Not too bad, huh?

Even if the treaty was blank pages I would be against it. The content of ACTA is irrelevant. The process used to create ACTA goes against what I believe are cornerstones of our society and the treaty should be killed for that alone. Any non-negative or even overtly positive terms of ACTA would not balance out the long term damage to our society caused by allowing ACTA to live.

I might sound like some kind of hardliner who is unwilling to compromise, but that's not true at all. Here is my compromise. If you just let ACTA die quietly, then I'm willing to let those involved in the creation of ACTA go free instead of sending them to jail.

The internet is not the Web. The internet is a set of standard protocols for delivering encoded information. The internet is free because it is prohibitively expensive to mechanically decode all transmitted information. Although it is certainly possible to decode transmitted information, especially if it was encoded mechanically.

The Web suffers from this problem. It is a set of standard protocols for encoding information. Since the information has been encoded mechanically, it is trivial to decode it into meaningful content. And, decoded content and access control go together like milk and cookies. This has always been a danger looming over everything we've built. Censorship of the Web has been an inevitability.

That's exactly why you bust your butt for 60 hours a week. You do it so that he sits in his parent's basement and gets high scores on Call of Duty instead of going out and mugging you in Central Park. Every large society is going to have some dead weight. It is a problem that cannot be ignored. Either you provide social services for the dead weight, or the dead weight turns to crime, or you euthanize the dead weight. Personally, I hate crime and I don't want to even think about the moral and procedural issues of deciding who gets to live. Thus, I pay my taxes. I don't like it, but it's the only solution we have that works.

Are you sure that JPEG is built on the assumption that the higher frequency components are less important? I doubt that any image processing expert would make a statement like that.

IMHO, JPEG was successful because of two important properties: (a) throwing away the hard to compress data and (b) using a compression algorithm that specifically targets the easy to compress data. It sounds so obvious when I state it like that but the difficult part is figuring out how to implement it. In the domain of natural pictures, (a) and (b) translated into high frequency components and a smooth block interpolation. JPEG chose to employ an expensive DCT transform. This was worth the extra cost because it could discard the high frequency components while simultaneously generating the interpolated low frequency data. It's got both (a) and (b) wrapped up into one tight little package.

I might be going senile, but I don't recall anybody saying that it was a good idea to throw away the high frequency components. Rather, JPEG was promoted exclusively for images that did not originally contain high frequency components. However, the juicy compression ratio was too hard to pass up and JPEG became widely used for compressing everything, much to the chagrin of those that understood the technology.

The technical answer is interesting but you should really consider the future consequences of purchasing a home with an obvious red flag. If you buy this home, you will eventually want to sell the home. Many potential buyers will most likely be turned off by the antenna. Not all buyers are proactive enough to educate themselves (or ask Slashdot to educate them) about RF emissions. Regardless of whether or not the home is safe, I would advise against purchasing it.

The typical skill in Eve grants a 2% to 5% bonus per level. There are 5 levels to a skill. The parent poster is estimating that the difference between a young player (level 4 skills) and an old player (level 5 skills) is only 10%. A lot of complexity has been brushed under the rug, but this estimate seems reasonable to me.

The combat system in Eve differs from the traditional RPG system. A traditional, D&D style RPG uses the hit points system. In that system you deal damage to the enemy every round. The enemy is defeated when the accumulated damage exceeds their hit points. A 10% damage bonus means that you can kill your enemy 10% faster.

In Eve, ships have the ability to indefinitely ignore damage due to shield and/or energy regeneration. The actual damage accumulated in each round is X minus Y. X is the raw damage dealt. Y is the amount of hit points regenerated. If X is less than or equal to Y then the attacker will never be able to destroy the enemy. A 10% difference can push you over this critical threshold. You can't put a quantitative value on that. It can mean the difference between achieving your goal, or completely failing.

In the case that X is greater than Y, the effective value of a 10% bonus is (X*1.1-Y)/(X-Y).

For example, suppose the attacker can do 250 damage per second (dps) and the defender can regenerate 150 dps. These numbers are based on an actual ship that I fly in Eve (Hurricane). The inflicted dps is 100. With a 10% bonus the attacker can do 275 dps. The inflicted dps is 125. Thus, the 10% bonus allows the attacker to destroy the enemy 25% faster.

It becomes even more complicated when you consider the MMO aspects of Eve. Basically, dps equals money. Expensive ammo and expensive ships give you damage bonuses. In a typical MMORPG you just try to maximize damage. In Eve you actually try to minimize damage. The goal is to destroy the enemy without risking too much money. The risk cannot be ignored because of the open ended PvP environment. You are always vulnerable to an ambush by your enemies or pirates.

Thus, you want X>Y so that you can achieve your goals, but you also want X as small as possible to reduce risk. In practice this means that you build a ship with a cost optimal dps which is Y+K. This is why Eve players fly leaky ships held together with duct tape and WoW players walk around in solid gold, jewel encrusted suits of armor.

Eve is sometimes called "Spreadsheets in Space" for a good reason. You have to do your math. Without doing these kinds of calculations you can flail helplessly against an enemy forever and lose stupidly expensive ships to pirates. In a typical PvE MMORPG you don't need to do the math. Just keep rolling the dice and slurping potions; eventually you will prevail.

I really liked the ad. I think it clearly shows the power of search engines to help people accomplish tasks by stringing together a set of simple search queries. Unfortunately, it also clearly shows the power of Google to collect those time ordered search queries and reconstruct a story that is intimately private. This ad could really backfire on Google.

Scene: the office of Joe the 60 year old congressman.

(before the Google super bowl ad)

Alice: Hey Joe, some computer privacy activists are asking us to look into regulating a company called Google. They do internet search stuff.

Joe: Google? I've heard of them, but isn't that mostly used by geeks to search for Star Wars quotes?

(after the Google super bowl ad)

Alice: Hey Joe, some computer privacy activists are asking us to look into regulating a company called Google. They do internet search stuff.

Joe: I saw their ad. Powerful stuff. Let's have Bob look into this.

Scene: the office of Joe the 60 year old congressman. Alice: Hey Joe, some computer activists are asking us to look into regulating a company called Google. The do internet search stuff. Joe: Google? I've heard of them, but isn't that mostly used by geeks to search for Star Wars quotes? Alice: Hey Joe, some computer activists are asking us to look into regulating a company called Google. The do internet search stuff. Joe: I saw their ad. Powerful stuff. Let's have Bob look into this.

Using 1.0.0.0/8 to avoid conflicting with 10.0.0.0/8 is silly. You violated a standard for no good reason. If you want a private IP address you must use one that has been reserved as private. If you want to join two private networks it is up to you to ensure that IP addresses are unique. Using 1.0.0.0/8 doesn't ensure that IP addresses are unique. You failed to solve the problem. Worse than that, you made your problem everybody's problem. Thanks a lot.

What you should have done to solve your problem is to create a private IP registration system which works inside the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. The tools to do this already exist. It's the exact same tools used to perform normal global IP registration. But, you had to go and steal from everybody else because you were too damn lazy to solve your own problems.

If the IRS pre-fills what the government knows about on the form, then that tells you what the government doesn't know about, and thus can safely be omitted.

Obviously there's a little game that can be played here. If the government suspects that you are cheating on your taxes it can deliberately omit something next year and see if you take the bait.

Personally, I've always seen filling out a tax return as a 5th Amendment violation. If I owe tax then send me a bill and I'll pay it. Otherwise, leave me alone. We should focus our efforts on building a better financial infrastructure that can correctly track taxable activities instead of forcing our citizens to incriminate themselves.

Mods, this post is intellectually void. Just because someone spent 40 billion euros on something does not mean it's worth 40 billion. That's circular logic and you can use it to justify anything.

An explanation of net neutrality for engineers.

Here's how an engineer thinks:

"This part costs 10 cents. My manager wants to make a 50% profit. Therefore, we will sell this part for 15 cents."

Here's how a sales manager thinks.

"Hmm, let's take a peek into this guy's wallet. If he's broke then we'll give it to him for free and release a press statement about how nice we are. If he's rich then we'll try to take every last penny he owns."

Note that price, cost and value have no impact on the sales manager's thought process. Opponents of net neutrality want a sales driven world where they can freely charge any outrageous price (both overly high and overly low).

Here is an informal pricing of common geek entertainment choices converted into dollars per hour at prices that I typically encounter in California. Important note: not all options are equal value. This is just a pricing guide, not a direct comparison.

Disneyland for 6 hours = $11 per hour
Museum, 3 hours = $6.66 per hour
Movie Theatre = $5 per hour
Computer game for 10 hours = $5 per hour
Premium Cable TV @ 2 hr/day = $1.66 per hour
Netflix, 5 movies per month = $0.90 per hour
Cable TV @ 2 hr/day = $0.83 per hour
Sci-Fi book read twice @ 1 min/page = $0.80 per hour
Good computer game for 100 hours = $0.50 per hour
World of Warcraft @ 2 hr/day = $0.25 per hour
5 minute song played 50 times = $0.24 per hour
Good Sci-Fi book read 20 times @ 1 min/page = $0.08 per hour
Good 5 minute song played 500 times = $0.02 per hour

Although I am not an educator, this discussion is so badly in need of a dose of reality that I feel I must speak up.

I was once asked to sit in on the education division's monthly meeting. The meeting was an eye opener for me. More than being open to the idea of changing how we teach, they were actively pursuing those ideas in live teaching environments. Here's a few of the ideas they were investigating: afterschool club activities, in-class workshops, hands-on activities with real science equipment, personal contact with senior scientists and engineers. Investigation means that they were measuring material cost in dollars and teacher labor in minutes (both prep time and class time). All but one study included a follow up visit 1 year later to collect measurements on how effective the methods were. Many studies tracked students all the way to college; specifically, they tracked whether or not students got a degrees in science and engineering. For the one study that did not have a 1 year follow up the presenter apologized profusely. The field tests spanned the entire US and covered from grade school up to high school.

In short, they were systematic and scientific in their efforts to improve how we teach.

There was too much information at that meeting (and out of my field of expertise) to process but my impression was as follows. Both students and instructors hate rote learning. But, nothing can beat it. Rote learning is incredibly dense, cheap, and scalable. The only technique which comes close is putting kids in a room with a senior scientist and letting them interact together. This method had good multi-year results but doesn't scale up because there just aren't enough scientists. The other methods may be cool and engaging, but they simply don't impart enough knowledge and don't keep kids motivated to stay in science and engineering all the way through college.

The parent poster wrote, "I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy."

If you consider scientifically investigating teaching methods and measuring their effectiveness with multi-year field studies an enlightened philosophy, then you got your dream education. Use it wisely.

The history of 3D on the web is absolutely dismal. As a "graphics guy", I have been repeatedly shocked over the last 13 years by what the "web guys" propose as a 3D-in-the-browser solution. I don't understand why there is such a mismatch between the two factions' ideas about graphics, but I accept that they are vastly different.

So, after many failures, this is where we are today. The graphics guys (Khronos) are saying, "Stop trying to make something fancy, just put OpenGL in the browser." And the web guys (Webkit) are saying, "Okay, fine."

The reason why this is different, and more dramatic, than previous attempts is due to the fundamental place that OpenGL occupies in the graphics world. There are dozens of better and more specialized ways of doing graphics, but OpenGL is the most widely known and widely spread. To put it colorfully, OpenGL is our last line of defense.

Therefore, this has to work. If this doesn't work, then there is no hope for 3D on the web. Which is silly.