Garg. - 04 June 2008

[silveradept]

Tried, without success, to do Boss Battles on Intense again - it requires a perfect run, I swear, because one mistake, and suddenly it’s a combo punishment worth 100% damage and getting slammed out of the arena. There must be a way of succeeding at this, but I have not figured out what it is. So I may shelve it and go play some other games that I know I can make progress on. No sense in beating my head against a puzzle that I don’t currently have the skills to solve.

Anyway. Onward and upward. Congratulations to the Detroit Red Wings for carting off a Stanley Cup this year. (‘Bout time, guys. Those President’s trophies were looking pretty forlorn.) It has also been rumored that Senator Clinton will suspend her presidential campaign on Saturday of this week, but I’ll believe that when I actually hear it happen.

My professional self gives a “good luck” to a project designed to quantify the amount of information in the world. If they can come up with something resembling a number and document the methods, I’ll be impressed.

In our international department, a mayor in Greece is offering to perform civil ceremonies for homosexuals, drawing a directive from the chief prosecutor of the country that said such ceremonies would be automatically nullified and illegal. Looks like we may have another showdown on the matter, and with the Orthodox church right there, I wonder how it will turn out. Back home, Colorado's governor signed into law a prohibition of discrimination based on gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Which, naturally caused an outcry among the wingnuts, and regular as clockwork, WingNutDaily has James Dobson decrying that the bill permits men to enter women's bathrooms without fear, thus making it possible for molesters and predators to assault women anywhere in public. Uh-huh. Did Mr. Dobson forget that it’s still basically illegal to do anything of the sort to anyone, and that someone who’s going to go in and assault women or sexually harass them probably doesn’t give a damn what the law says about it? All this legislation does is makes it legal for the transgendered or those who feel a different gender than their biological one will have the ability to use the bathroom which makes them the most comfortable. Now, I can understand where it will be off-putting to some, at least at first. Plus, anyone deliberately crossing the lines would have to be confident in their gender identity to risk the disapproving stares of everyone around.

In the Middle East, more building in Jerusalem, meaning more complaints of "settlements" that would disrupt the peace processes. Sounds like there’s still going to be more than a few generations of fighting before both sides finally get tired enough of it to work something out that they’ll stick to.

After a successful bombing of the Danish embassy, Pakistan's government is considering pulling all of the other foreign embassies into a more secure location.

Ah, and progress in Iraq - The United States has said it could take on a whopping 8,000 more refugees from Iraq, getting close to the stated goal of a mere 12,000 for the year. How very generous of us, that we can cause all that damage and then accept such a large amount of the populace that has been displaced from our efforts. It almost makes you wonder about the kinder, gentler, but still torture being done in our names to plenty of people.

In addition to Blackwater, it appears the United States government is interested in buying Brazilian fighter planes.

Getting into domestic matters, Another data breach of sensitive information, this time relating to persons at the Walter Reed military hospital. Obviously, there is no such thing as a completely secure system, but it sounds like the tools to defeat security systems are evolving much faster than the security systems themselves.

I’m sure I’ve chronicled several reasons why Senator McCain, in my opinion, is unfit to be the president of the United States. Here’s another - He supports and would keep around the warrantless wiretapping program started by this administration. There’s a reason people are calling Senator McCain Mr. Bush’s third term. That he supports the flagrant disregard for the law under the pretense of a “war” on a concept makes him even more unfit for the office he aspires to.

cmpriest offers up, now that the matter of the Democratic candidate for President has a presumptive nominee, a capsule summary of Senator Obama's accomplishments in his political offices held thus far.

Finally, out of candidate manners, this should probably come as a surprise to no one, but there is at least one web site that wants Senator Clinton's supporters to vote for Senator McCain, because of a beef with the way that procedure was used handling the delegations of Florida and Michigan, or an implication that Democratic primary voters are sexist, or through irrational paranoia that Senator Obama is a Muslim, or an anti-American person, because of his church affiliations, his personal friends, his wife, or any one of a hundred thousand reasons, many using conservative-to-Fox-News-to-WingNutDaily data and opinions to try and convince nominally liberal voters to vote for the conservative candidate. Already, I can see the things that are sticking in people’s minds are not policy issues, but personality issues and the baseless rumors that try to paint Senator Obama as someone to be feared, and that unless we vote for the conservative candidate, we’re basically guaranteeing that there will be another terrorist attack during the next presidential administration. Does this sound familiar? It’s W. Bush’s 2004 campaign rhetoric. It will get paired with the accusations that somehow Senator Obama is an elitist, out-of-touch liberal, unlike the P.O.W. conservative, who understands you, Joe Sixpack, and wants to protect your wife and your children from dark-skinned Muslim terrorists, you know, that look like Senator Obama, kind of. If Senator Clinton were to win, the rhetoric would shift to make her elitist, and a weak woman who couldn’t possibly stand up to the terrar or the men’s game of presidential politics. If people are going to obsess about shallow things in this candidacy, why don’t I see more about how old Senator McCain is, or how he might be at risk to relapse into PTSD and order a nuclear launch? I can do personality quirks and character assassinations, too. Especially ones that are only loosely based on the history of the candidate.

I know that in the illusion of two-party politics, why it is expected that disillusioned Clinton supporters are expected or are being courted to vote for Senator McCain, but with the existence of a wealth of third party candidates, it should be no particular problem for them to find someone of similar ideology and cast their vote accordingly. There is no need nor requirement for someone not voting for the Democrat to vote for the Republican. In fact, the election would probably work better if people actually voted their ideology. At least then, we would know how many people really supported fringe candidates on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

Into the opinion columns - William McGurn believes that the "surge" and the firing of Donald Rumsfeld count as sufficient examples of Mr. Bush's policy on Iraq changing, unlike Mr. McClellan’s allegations that all things were to be subsumed to the Iraq narrative without reflection, reconsideration, or compromise. We note that despite the apparent magnitude of the change and reconsideration, that there was probably no serious discussion about leaving Iraq. Deciding to send in more troops to do what the first bunch was supposed to accomplish is not really a serious change in policy. Nor is sacking the person responsible for the screw-up that produced the situation in the first place. It’s still consistent with the idea that military force can actually defeat insurgency, working on the same principle of putting a fire out - smother it enough with a big blanket to cut off the oxygen, and eventually it dies down.

Sen. James Inhofe is not pleased with a global warming bill being debated in the Senate this week. He points out an important part of the way new regulations always work in the country - rather than paying for the new regs and having some smaller amount of profit for the shareholders to salivate over, anything that potentially increases costs is passed onto the consumer without a second thought or a worry as to whether the new prices will stay affordable, or only get worse. Inhofe wants to kill the bill because he finds it a lot of pork spending for almost no effect, so that the congress can say they did something about global warming, but I also think there should be some investigations into whether or not corporations could suck up a few of those increased costs, in the interest of not pricing their customers out of being able to afford their service. After all, no profit if there’s no one there who can afford the product. If the poorest are already paying about 20% of their income to cover the heating bills, passing on price increases only makes things worse. And I’m sure that if they should lose their housing because of the heating costs, someone else will assume that they are homeless because they are lazy or made “decisions” to not work 100 hour work weeks at minimum wage to pay for all those costs. Maybe they’ll bow to the pressure, and give up their children because the cost is too high, which would invoke a completely different set of right-wing attacks and put the children at the mercy of the foster care system.

Speaking of profits, the airplanes are going down, going bankrupt, and now they're asking the government to bail them out, but unlike the banking systems, which are fairly close to critical infrastructure, if several airlines folded up and had to try again on a more efficient and effective cost structure, it would suck to fly anything, people or cargo, for a while, but that would be the extent of it. And perhaps a reborn airline industry would be more willing to provide a comfortable, fuel-efficient flight for those who want to take them. A strange world we live in where people are expected to suck it up and pay bigger costs while companies profit, but other corporations can go to the government asking for assistance and this seems normal. Precisely who is in charge of this country, anyway, and what is their real agenda? And will they accomplish those ends through the person making a franchise out of selling drug testing services to paranoid employers as much as the government that wants to take away basic rights and freedoms?

Some other things to think about - The impact that parents have on their children, by being a person the kids can play with, and the person whose approval they seek (for a while) - parents are their childrens’ best friends, for a time. Kind of riffing on this theme, Token Minorities wants to develop a game based on the experiences of the Black Panther movement, as a way of adding consequences and effects to games like Grand Theft Auto, to show how things really work, and whether or not force is really needed to effect change. Admittedly, for many, the appeal of Grand Theft Auto is its lack of rules and consequences... or the fun of getting as many of those consequences to chase you merrily. Still, having perhaps, the “Ghandi alternative” in a similar sort of game would be interesting to watch. Assuming it wasn’t an unwinnable scenario.

Michael Johnson, part of the gold-medal winning United States men's 4x400 team in 2000, will be returning his gold medal to the IOC after revelations that a teammate was taking banned substances at the time. A difficult decision to do, but one that will earn him praise for deciding not to keep the record of a tainted victory.

The technology department has something rather strange from the Japanese - a teddy bear that is also a vehicle navigation system, including safety features like the ability to detect alcohol (and admonish the driver) as well as react to sudden stops. Oh, and it gestures as well as speaking when giving directions. I wonder how creeped out people would be by such a thing. Or creeped out that algorithms are being developed for GPS to guess what kind of transport people are using while their transponders are on, such that the GPS can guess whether or not you’re in the car or not.

Significantly more creepy is an interactive website, apparently for children, that suggests when each of them should have perished, so as not to exceed their allotment of natural resources. Really weird. Pretty creepy. Supposed to help people get environmentally conscious and all that. A much more effective method would be noting the energy costs of popular electronic devices and possibly or things like cars and the like. When people notice that it costs more than $250 per year to leave the PS3 on standby, running protein folding software, they might decide to leave that task to the computers.

In hopefully less creepy affairs, voice recognition technology is finally starting to become useful for several applications. Talking to machines is still going to be weird for a lot of people, but soon the machines should be able to figure that part out.

In purer science, the Milky Way galaxy is only two-armed, according to new pictures taken, rather than the four that we’re accustomed to. Additionally, the channel for appetite and the channel for fat storage may not be related at all, which could permit the production of drugs that would let you eat all you like and still lose weight (a Kurzweil prediction linked to not a couple days ago).

In talking about the annals of love and sexuality, sex and violence have been linked for a very long time, according to a new discovery that proclaims prehistoric mean would beat the rivals of their partners to death, possibly to steal more women for themselves. On a much happier note, a story from a child who experienced the consequences of a group marriage firsthand while he was growing up. And surprisingly enough, it was the divorce following that was the worst part of the experience. The actual marriage, while weird, unconventional, and potentially embarrassing, wasn’t all that bad, it sounds like. Last from this particular section, Marty Klein wants more "activist" judges, especially when it comes to laws involving sex, because while the populace as a whole, including powerful lobbies of conservative groups, always appears to want laws passed that restrict our sexuality, it’s been a fairly consistent refrain that those laws do not stand up to constitutional scrutiny. Which is the way the judiciary should work, testing the laws against the requirements of the constitutions of the state and the country, regardless as to whom appointed them or passed the law. So, more “activist” judges, please, more open talk about sex and sexuality, and less closeting and attempts to keep people uninformed or misinformed about sex and sexuality.

Last for tonight, the Happiness Project offers eight tips for improving happines that don't take long to do. We could all stand to be happier.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Surely it is missing the point to suggest that a cost of $250 for one PS3-year of processing should make people "leave that to the computers" - the cost (and power usage) of a server farm is significantly higher than that for the same computational work, partly due to the need for extensive airconditioning systems in server farms. If people followed the suggestion that they should save their personal $250, they'd actually be doing bad things for the environment in terms of computational costs...

[silveradept]

Ah, no, I wasn't suggesting leaving it all to server farms, but instead downloading and using clients like that on home computers, which, according to the graph, have less electricity cost and are probably able to perform many of the same duties. I don't know about comparable performance on them, but for people looking to trim a bit from their budgets and still do the protein folding work, a client for their desktops may be more economical.

How can I word it to get that across?

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Well, again, it depends on what you want to optimise for - without checking, I can't be sure, but I seem to remember performance on PS3s being surprisingly better than on conventional desktops (at least, without using CUDA... which would probably ramp up your power usage significantly, considering that the most power hungry part of a modern PC is not the processor, but the Graphics card in many cases...)

All I was trying to do was to note that these things are often a lot more complicated than you might initially think. The "right" option depends upon what you want to optimise for - power usage per user? power usage per unit processed? units processed per time? (If we all wanted to be really power efficient, we'd just not bother doing protein folding on this kind of scale, of course...)

[silveradept]

Point made. I think the graphs are designed for optimization of electric cost versus optimization of actual processing power and ability. I don't know if it exists, but if there were a client like BOINC's text-only client, with no need to engage the graphics card, how much power consumption would be saved by having the ability to turn off and leave off the graphics unit?

[shadesfox.livejournal.com]

I'm still skeptical about voice interfaces. As far as I can tell the best use for a voice interface is for TV shows where the actor and the computer can interact in a way the audience can observe, an audience interface rather then a user interface if you will.

[silveradept]

That's good - I'm also thinking of possibilities for getting the computer to run tasks while one's hands are otherwise occupied - a weather and traffic report while showering, a recipe on display while attempting to follow it, or perhaps dictation for someone who likes that particular form of letter-writing first.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Dictation's good - but the major thing that has always held voice interfaces back (they've actually been usable for a while now) is the "convenience and embarrassment factor" - it is often both faster and less disruptive to others to not use voice control... (Roll on subvocalised interfaces, I suspect.)

[silveradept]

Aye to that, or being able to focus mentally one's dictation through a control hat or neural implant. Voice controls would be good, though, for any sort of meeting or discussion where everyone is thinking aloud already, and thus editing/podcasting and transcription of the event would be pretty easy.