Although he's right that people are tired of readding friends on each network, one flaw is that "friend" has different meanings. On some, it's simply "This person is my friend". On some like Facebook, it also means they can see information about you that others might not. On LiveJournal however (which was created by the author of this article), it goes far beyond simply "friend"; it indicates which journals you want to read, and who can see your "friends only" entries. So conceivably, who I want as a friend on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as who I want as a "friend" on LJ.
Now theoretically this can be handled in that "people whose journals I want to read" could be a subset of anyone I list as my friend (i.e., you have an option for each friend whether you read their entries, whether they can read yours, or whatever is specific for that site). But that's more hassle for individual users.
It's recognized that users don't always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a "friend" on one site has a very different meaning of a "friend" on another. The goal is to just provide sites and users the raw data, and they can use it to implement whatever policies they want.
Go on. Read the article. You know you want to. You'll find out why the museum has to be packed up every winter, and learn that Apple had a portable music player as far back as 1979. And more!
I'm all for skeptical inquiry, but fudging figures and inventing facts to support a skeptical viewpoint is in principle no more justifiable than claiming that "quantum science proves the existence of a universal field vibration consciousness frequency oscillation harmonic and that means we're surrounded by ascended pleadian spirit aliens from atlantis".
Just because someone calls himself a skeptic doesn't mean that everything he says is immediately and undeniably true. One of the reasons I think skepticism is important is that blind faith is dangerous. Blind faith in skepticism (or, for that matter, individual skeptics) isn't just dangerous, it's an oxymoron. YMMV, of course.
I've noticed a few things keep being posted and they get modded up every time, so here they are all collected in one post for your up-modding pleasure! (or modding up pleasure, should you so prefer)
- All we have to do is drop enough plants and Mars will become lush and habitable! - Mars has no magnetosphere, so any atmosphere we create there would be stripped away! - Look at the horrible, horrible things we've done to our world! How can we do that to the poor, innocent Martian microbes who may or may not exist? - Venus is a much better candidate for terraforming. It has an atmosphere and everything!
I am envisioning something like a stack of 4 dimensional space-time continuums all lined up along a fifth dimension, with worm holes propelling objects along the 5d axis between these continuums. Continua.
I've been rather fascinated with Peter Carroll's hypothesis of 6-dimensional space-time for a while now. He has a few dozen articles up at specularium.org
iirc he suggests that 3-dimensional space is curved in one of the extra time dimensions to form a finite, boundless 4-dimensional hypersphere, and 1-dimensional time is curved in the other extra time dimension to form a finite, boundless 2-dimensional circle.
a) No more generations of particles can exist. (Subject only to falsification)
b) No Higgs particle exists. (Subject only to falsification)
c) As it seems that no known natural process except, perhaps, neutron star or black hole collisions could cause a sufficiently large quantity of matter to undergo a sufficient acceleration to produce graviton bosons in detectable quantities, we shall never easily detect gravity waves (subject only to falsification).
d) The principle of t-axis neutrality does permit the existence of a number of exotic bosons corresponding to configurations such as :
d-quark/positron, or d-antiquark/electron or any type of quark/antineutrino or antiquark/neutrino
Within Hyperwarp 6D theory a "leptoquark boson" does not really represent a fifth force of nature, anymore than weak (W-, W+, or Zo) bosons represent anything other than a special case of electromagnetism. See Leptoquarks and Neutron Stars paper.
e) Spacetime singularities larger than fundamental particles do not exist. The quantisation of particle properties in terms of spacetime curvature implies a quantisation of spacetime itself and the top quark represents the maximum possible curvature at any point.
f) Neutrinos can annihilate against neutrinos in head on collisions. Antineutrinos can likewise annihilate against antineutrinos. Such collisions could create photon pairs or pairs of neutrinos of other generations. This controversial proposition lies open to experimental confirmation. It may also contribute a solution to the solar neutrino problem.
Wouldn't "one person that does the registration of domains" be a single point of failure? imo the internet's greatest strength is how distributed everything is. Remember how everyone was suggesting wikipedia solve their bandwidth woes (link) with a P2P-based hosting system?
On a tenuously related note: During my brief fling with SEO, a lot of people were claiming that domain name just isn't that important any more. Being on the first page of relevant google searches is going to do a lot more for most sites than having a great domain.
I read tfa (or a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile) a few days ago. iirc they mentioned a sports team (looking into?) using The Glove. All sorts of steroids and otherwise innocuous chemicals are already banned in professional sports. Would the organising bodies allow the use of The Glove? More importantly, would they allow it because it The Right Thing (tm) or just because there's no way to test for it?
Patents today are used to stifle innovation, to create inefficient artificial monopolies and to prevent competition and subvert the free market. And to maximise shareholder value, by means of the above.
The open source movement and companies like slim devices disprove the notion that inventors would die of starvation. If all designs were freely available (alternatively, if inventors had the OPTION of ensuring that their designs and derivatives thereof remained freely available) the bloated, inefficient megacorps would die of starvation while those who could most quickly respond to changing demands and most efficiently manufacture to meet those demands, would prosper.
Or maybe something totally unexpected would happen, but that's always a possibility with sweeping legal, economic or social changes.
(Open) source code is more easily human readable than binary. The humans that are looking at the (compiled binary) code of closed source software are probably doing so illegally, and the minimum knowledge required to read and understand it is greater than the minimum knowledge required to read and understand source code. So the people who just poke around to have a look are less likely to report bugs, because that code was supposed to be closed source. And the people looking for ways to break it are probably more likely to have nefarious intentions.
The enteric nervous system is a bunch of neurons in the lining of your digestive system that are complex enough to be called a brain in their own right.
Slashdot Mirror
Although he's right that people are tired of readding friends on each network, one flaw is that "friend" has different meanings. On some, it's simply "This person is my friend". On some like Facebook, it also means they can see information about you that others might not. On LiveJournal however (which was created by the author of this article), it goes far beyond simply "friend"; it indicates which journals you want to read, and who can see your "friends only" entries. So conceivably, who I want as a friend on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as who I want as a "friend" on LJ.
Now theoretically this can be handled in that "people whose journals I want to read" could be a subset of anyone I list as my friend (i.e., you have an option for each friend whether you read their entries, whether they can read yours, or whatever is specific for that site). But that's more hassle for individual users.
From TFA:
It's recognized that users don't always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a "friend" on one site has a very different meaning of a "friend" on another. The goal is to just provide sites and users the raw data, and they can use it to implement whatever policies they want.
Post links to second page; first page at http://news.com.com/A+trip+down+computer+memory+la ne/2100-1042_3-6203311.html and almost-ad-free print version at http://news.com.com/2102-1042_3-6203311.html?tag=s t.util.print
Go on. Read the article. You know you want to. You'll find out why the museum has to be packed up every winter, and learn that Apple had a portable music player as far back as 1979. And more!
"Could you point out some specific flaws?"
o tt_Randi.htm
Not specific flaws in his debunking of homeopathy, but some skeptical reports on other claims Randi's made:
http://www.sheldrake.org/controversies/randi.html
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/exam/Presc
I'm all for skeptical inquiry, but fudging figures and inventing facts to support a skeptical viewpoint is in principle no more justifiable than claiming that "quantum science proves the existence of a universal field vibration consciousness frequency oscillation harmonic and that means we're surrounded by ascended pleadian spirit aliens from atlantis".
Just because someone calls himself a skeptic doesn't mean that everything he says is immediately and undeniably true. One of the reasons I think skepticism is important is that blind faith is dangerous. Blind faith in skepticism (or, for that matter, individual skeptics) isn't just dangerous, it's an oxymoron. YMMV, of course.
I've noticed a few things keep being posted and they get modded up every time, so here they are all collected in one post for your up-modding pleasure! (or modding up pleasure, should you so prefer)
- All we have to do is drop enough plants and Mars will become lush and habitable!
- Mars has no magnetosphere, so any atmosphere we create there would be stripped away!
- Look at the horrible, horrible things we've done to our world! How can we do that to the poor, innocent Martian microbes who may or may not exist?
- Venus is a much better candidate for terraforming. It has an atmosphere and everything!
I've been rather fascinated with Peter Carroll's hypothesis of 6-dimensional space-time for a while now. He has a few dozen articles up at specularium.org
n t&task=view&id=26&Itemid=55&Itemid=1 ):
iirc he suggests that 3-dimensional space is curved in one of the extra time dimensions to form a finite, boundless 4-dimensional hypersphere, and 1-dimensional time is curved in the other extra time dimension to form a finite, boundless 2-dimensional circle.
He makes some falsifiable predictions based on his theory (from http://specularium.org/index.php?option=com_conte
9. Predictions from the Hyperwarp 6D model
a) No more generations of particles can exist. (Subject only to falsification)
b) No Higgs particle exists. (Subject only to falsification)
c) As it seems that no known natural process except, perhaps, neutron star or black hole collisions could cause a sufficiently large quantity of matter to undergo a sufficient acceleration to produce graviton bosons in detectable quantities, we shall never easily detect gravity waves (subject only to falsification).
d) The principle of t-axis neutrality does permit the existence of a number of exotic bosons corresponding to configurations such as :
d-quark/positron, or d-antiquark/electron or any type of quark/antineutrino or antiquark/neutrino
Within Hyperwarp 6D theory a "leptoquark boson" does not really represent a fifth force of nature, anymore than weak (W-, W+, or Zo) bosons represent anything other than a special case of electromagnetism. See Leptoquarks and Neutron Stars paper.
e) Spacetime singularities larger than fundamental particles do not exist. The quantisation of particle properties in terms of spacetime curvature implies a quantisation of spacetime itself and the top quark represents the maximum possible curvature at any point.
f) Neutrinos can annihilate against neutrinos in head on collisions. Antineutrinos can likewise annihilate against antineutrinos. Such collisions could create photon pairs or pairs of neutrinos of other generations. This controversial proposition lies open to experimental confirmation. It may also contribute a solution to the solar neutrino problem.
Wouldn't "one person that does the registration of domains" be a single point of failure? imo the internet's greatest strength is how distributed everything is. Remember how everyone was suggesting wikipedia solve their bandwidth woes (link) with a P2P-based hosting system? On a tenuously related note: During my brief fling with SEO, a lot of people were claiming that domain name just isn't that important any more. Being on the first page of relevant google searches is going to do a lot more for most sites than having a great domain.
I read tfa (or a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile) a few days ago. iirc they mentioned a sports team (looking into?) using The Glove. All sorts of steroids and otherwise innocuous chemicals are already banned in professional sports. Would the organising bodies allow the use of The Glove? More importantly, would they allow it because it The Right Thing (tm) or just because there's no way to test for it?
No.
w )
The purpose of patent protection is to incentivise merchants to release imported technologies into the public domain (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_la
Patents today are used to stifle innovation, to create inefficient artificial monopolies and to prevent competition and subvert the free market. And to maximise shareholder value, by means of the above.
The open source movement and companies like slim devices disprove the notion that inventors would die of starvation. If all designs were freely available (alternatively, if inventors had the OPTION of ensuring that their designs and derivatives thereof remained freely available) the bloated, inefficient megacorps would die of starvation while those who could most quickly respond to changing demands and most efficiently manufacture to meet those demands, would prosper.
Or maybe something totally unexpected would happen, but that's always a possibility with sweeping legal, economic or social changes.
(Open) source code is more easily human readable than binary. The humans that are looking at the (compiled binary) code of closed source software are probably doing so illegally, and the minimum knowledge required to read and understand it is greater than the minimum knowledge required to read and understand source code. So the people who just poke around to have a look are less likely to report bugs, because that code was supposed to be closed source. And the people looking for ways to break it are probably more likely to have nefarious intentions.
> WHERE IS THE 2nd BRAIN?
s _3_32/ai_54504396h tm
In your gut.
The enteric nervous system is a bunch of neurons in the lining of your digestive system that are complex enough to be called a brain in their own right.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/i
http://www.aikidoaus.com.au/dojo/docs/2nd_braina.