Most decisions of this sort are driven by laziness.
Actually, I don't think it's laziness in this case. Getting the most done with least effort is efficiency. Designing a GUI (window manager) is like designing roads. Safe roads are uncluttered, give warnings in advance, have a predictable path, separate traffic (tasks) in a meaningful way and tolerate human error. Safe roads are easy to design cars for. Safe roads mean you won't panic if your wife or teenage kid decide to take the car for a spin one day without you being there giving instructions. Good roads also lead to places you want to go to.
A good window manager is all of the above. Especially the last point. I like, for example, how Nautilus can make network connections appear somewhat like the rest of the file system and lead you there without much guesswork. But I wish it was more fault tolerant and didn't keep asking me to log again in every time it times out. KDE has proven to be very flexible and powerful but when a novice uses my KDE desktop I find I have to come back and reposition things and fix what they broke. A bit too flexible, I guess.
It's not totally 'taste', there is room for science in this and human interface study is valid.
All of the proposed changes are a step backwards. JavaScript is currently a language with great, clean, semantics and slightly ugly syntax. They want to make the semantics less clean and the syntax even more horrendous.
But wait until Sunday and we'll hear that Javascript 2.0 has arisen and all the stains of previous imperfect languages will be taken away.
I played with mercury as a child. We used to rub dimes on it, and push it around on a desk and i our hands. I had like 5 pounds of the stuff in a bottle, enough co contaminate the solar system if ne CFB contaminates 1000 gallons of water.
It's not elemental mercury that does damage, but mercury that has been included into organic molecules by other organisms that you eat, such as fish (which in turn ate smaller animals with mercury and so concentrated the environmental mercury for your inconvenience). There was a lot of talk about the evils of mercury fillings but of all the millions of people who have them, practically none of them has ever had mercury poisoning as a result - but what is the cancer risk from having epoxy resin slowly degrading in your mouth?
There is an awful lot of FUD around the dangers of mercury and other heavy metals.
And just to demonstrate, I shall now drink this cup of mercury whilst reciting the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland backwards.
At it's worst, it will be used to track dissidents and limit free speech world wide, while criminals continue to do what they always have. Maybe. Crime is difficult to fight. They aren't doing anything stupid by comparing methods but you're right that crime requires a determination by the police to be honest and genuine, otherwise it will back-fire. Oh and the crime fighters actually have to be intelligent/educated, which is often a major problem.
Larrabee has been around for ages. I remember how in Get Smart he worked for Control, but in the end he quit to join IBM. Now we find him again, this time at Intel. I think I'm having another one of those headaches again.
Now that I'd love to see happen, especially for rural areas. Currently paying a fair bit for Skymesh 2-way satellite along with another $60/mth or so for NextG for on the road. It's a sad state of affairs, that's for sure.... at least the 2-way satellite is cheaper than NextG. It's interesting to see what people are doing in the rural areas at the moment since ISDN is being wound down (or at least the prices hiked up by closing down the 'home ISDN' service). Internode, I heard, are installing Wimax around Adelaide for the same prices as ADSL, which, if they can keep that up, is fantastic. Worth buying into a company like that, I reckon.
In Australia, the 3G network is freaking expensive and just not an option for anyone who wants wireless as a replacement for wired internet (eg: out-of-city residents). Word has it, however, that the roll-out of Ericsson based wireless will mean an end to Telstra's monopoly on wireless broadband and some seriously competitive pricing (meaning the same cost as wired broadband with the same data plans).
If that does eventuate, then I'm definitely buying!
If "dirty" implies morally wrong, only the espionage engineer seems to apply. What about "kiss-ass golden boy" or "underpaid so has to pimp self out to on-line video chat room using company's servers" or "sewer-control-system-maintainer". I think the black-ops job is far from dirty - sounds like a hell of a lot of fun to me and the people doing it are probably loving it.
...so long as you redefine privacy to mean exclusively "photographic images of your body", and exclude anything else including the contents of your own pockets. That's a pretty narrow definition of privacy. So narrow, in fact, that it stops being privacy at all.
[ Reply to This ] Have a bit of pity on the people who have to look at the pictures all day. That's an aweful lot of disgusting bodies to look at for just a few good looking ones!
I'd like to see the levels present in the average American's blood-stream. Much higher, because it's the American's blood stream where the drugs originally came from. Any way, finding increased levels of contraceptives in the water should fix the problem. Overpopulation is the reason we need to recycle water anyway.
Seriously, you have the option of FiOS and you're complaining about your non-FiOS connection? Upgrade, and consider yourself lucky that you have the opportunity to do so! Yeah, how dare you complain about your bandwidth being crippled. And how dare you be satisfied with the internet connection you had already!
It most likely passed through with so few complaints because of how different the culture is there from here. Perhaps. It's inevitable that we are all ending up on databases of some kind, because this is part of being a part of an organized society. Perhaps they realize that over there, but the real isse as I see it has always been "who gets to see the information and what information are they collecting" and not so much "am I registered somewhere".
the safe load level of a pst is around 2gb , after that it is subject to corruption The safe distance for a politician from a voter is about 2ft (unless your arm is longer), after which he is also subject to corruption.
You see, you don't have to worry about who the experts are. Everyone has their own experts. I think it has worked well. When trying to find out the practical aspects of a new area of study, the first step is to know what the right questions to ask are, which is very easy if you read a forum where more knowledgeable people are themselves asking those questions. Then it's a simple matter of looking for the answers which in most cases is very easy.
This is going to be a case of "Your betters know better", which simply will not fly.
It's too expensive for one thing. Take for example the medical field. How much of the body of knowledge is "Level 1 Evidence"? You'll find that only a small proportion of what is in a medical textbook meets this standard, because it requires a formal review panel of experts systematically analyzing properly undertaken studies with blinding and so forth, and even then you have to take it with a grain of salt most of the time. It's just so terribly labour intensive that the job has to be restricted to narrowly defined, very important areas of interest.
Ordinary people are much better than experts at offering real, useful knowledge with everyday applications. People are after coalface experience and are getting it for nothing. Hard to beat that.
Also, when it comes to current affairs / intelligence, nobody trusts a commercial or government agency on these things anyway. At least they won't for long, because you get to see how useless their information is.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I don't think it's laziness in this case. Getting the most done with least effort is efficiency. Designing a GUI (window manager) is like designing roads. Safe roads are uncluttered, give warnings in advance, have a predictable path, separate traffic (tasks) in a meaningful way and tolerate human error. Safe roads are easy to design cars for. Safe roads mean you won't panic if your wife or teenage kid decide to take the car for a spin one day without you being there giving instructions. Good roads also lead to places you want to go to.
A good window manager is all of the above. Especially the last point. I like, for example, how Nautilus can make network connections appear somewhat like the rest of the file system and lead you there without much guesswork. But I wish it was more fault tolerant and didn't keep asking me to log again in every time it times out. KDE has proven to be very flexible and powerful but when a novice uses my KDE desktop I find I have to come back and reposition things and fix what they broke. A bit too flexible, I guess.
It's not totally 'taste', there is room for science in this and human interface study is valid.
But wait until Sunday and we'll hear that Javascript 2.0 has arisen and all the stains of previous imperfect languages will be taken away.
It's not elemental mercury that does damage, but mercury that has been included into organic molecules by other organisms that you eat, such as fish (which in turn ate smaller animals with mercury and so concentrated the environmental mercury for your inconvenience). There was a lot of talk about the evils of mercury fillings but of all the millions of people who have them, practically none of them has ever had mercury poisoning as a result - but what is the cancer risk from having epoxy resin slowly degrading in your mouth?
There is an awful lot of FUD around the dangers of mercury and other heavy metals.
And just to demonstrate, I shall now drink this cup of mercury whilst reciting the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland backwards.
Incidentally, I suspect at the announcement of the aforementioned committe, a counter-committee is being secretly formed as we speak:
"Fellowship Undermining Cybercop Knowledge - You Obviously Understand"
SACCWG sounds really stupid if you try to pronounce the mnemonic. How is anyone gonna remember that?
What about "Universal Working Alliance Networking Cybercrime Knowledge", or something?
Actually, stupidly enough, I think the robot in Get Smart was Hymie.
Larrabee has been around for ages. I remember how in Get Smart he worked for Control, but in the end he quit to join IBM. Now we find him again, this time at Intel. I think I'm having another one of those headaches again.
In Australia, the 3G network is freaking expensive and just not an option for anyone who wants wireless as a replacement for wired internet (eg: out-of-city residents). Word has it, however, that the roll-out of Ericsson based wireless will mean an end to Telstra's monopoly on wireless broadband and some seriously competitive pricing (meaning the same cost as wired broadband with the same data plans).
If that does eventuate, then I'm definitely buying!
...so long as you redefine privacy to mean exclusively "photographic images of your body", and exclude anything else including the contents of your own pockets. That's a pretty narrow definition of privacy. So narrow, in fact, that it stops being privacy at all. [ Reply to This ] Have a bit of pity on the people who have to look at the pictures all day. That's an aweful lot of disgusting bodies to look at for just a few good looking ones!(err.. and before someone arrests me for that comment, I wasn't being LITERAL)
Why stop at blowing up the FCC?
*Spit* Nyeeehh, all them dayum numbers look the same to me anyways.
Whachutalkinabout Willace!
That's exactly what my mother used to say about my old sneakers.
It's too expensive for one thing. Take for example the medical field. How much of the body of knowledge is "Level 1 Evidence"? You'll find that only a small proportion of what is in a medical textbook meets this standard, because it requires a formal review panel of experts systematically analyzing properly undertaken studies with blinding and so forth, and even then you have to take it with a grain of salt most of the time. It's just so terribly labour intensive that the job has to be restricted to narrowly defined, very important areas of interest.
Ordinary people are much better than experts at offering real, useful knowledge with everyday applications. People are after coalface experience and are getting it for nothing. Hard to beat that.
Also, when it comes to current affairs / intelligence, nobody trusts a commercial or government agency on these things anyway. At least they won't for long, because you get to see how useless their information is.