It seems to me that these findings challenge the underlying assumptions of randomness in quantum theory. It seems that radioactive decay is not the completely random event that we thought it was; instead it is influenced by its environment. Which opens up the possibility that anything that we perceive to be a random event is nothing more than our perception: a kind of backhand acknowledgement of our degree of ignorance about the conditions that shaped that event.
That undermines a lot more than just cosmology. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics could no longer be thought of as universal; they would at best be mere suggestions that in our experience this is usually the way things seem to go....
Any way you look at it, what these guys discovered is mind-bending stuff. Congratulations to the researchers. This was science at its best: going from "Hey, we're getting funny results here" to doing the grunt work of analyzing all that historical data. It would have been so much easier to just say "That can't be... there must have been some glitch in our equipment on that day." This was Nobel Prize kind of work.
English is currently evolving faster than any language has ever done before. And that is because it is the dominant language on the Internet.
Here are some interesting things to think about:
The number of people who are proficient in English as a second language (ESLers) is now greater than the total number of native English speakers (NESers) in the world. It is likely to soon exceed the total number of native English speakers who have ever lived.
The number of written exchanges in English that involve at least one ESLer now exceeds exchanges between NESers.
The number of exchanges in English that involve only ESLers will soon exceed the number of exchanges where there is an NESer participating.
It is now common for persons separated by geography and native language barriers to cooperate on developing intellectual property, such as software. When someone from Finland, someone from Argentina, and someone from Japan decide to cooperate on a project, they will use English as their project language, even though none of them are NESers.
You look at the support forums for any of the international projects-- MySQL, Apache, Linux, Blender, Joomla, the various wikis, etc-- and you see a huge number of requests and answers written in "bad" English. Except it is not bad English: standards have changed and so long as you can make yourself understood, nobody gives an RA about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
This is a tremendous influx of foreign influences into English, and striking directly at the very core of the literate communities. Expect to see the language bent and reshaped during your lifetime. It won't break; English has proven itself to be too resilient to get borked by this kind of thing. But it will get bent in some really wild ways, for instance, the verbing of nouns will become so commonplace that the grammarians will need to figure out what the rules for that are. In English, grammar, spelling, and punctuation "rules" have always followed from accepted usage; they have never dictated what is acceptable.
So basically I think TFA has missed the big story as it focuses on the small potatoes of Internet jargons. Mai teh toobz bee wid ya, nao n 4evah moah!
A boat being a hole in the water that you pour money into.
For those of us who can't afford such things, we are in the process of discovering that finding information is no longer the valuable skill that it used to be; now the skills are in demand are in filtering the info to get to what is useful. And that seems to mostly be a matter of anti-informing: deliberately choosing to be ignorant about things that just don't matter.
Of course there is the problem of determining what does matter. But that was probably always the case.
If static languages are better, why is the bulk of web development done with dynamic languages?
I'm aware of two critically important reasons that most developers of proprietary software will not mention:
With static languages you can deliver just a binary and limit distribution of the source to only persons who sign a non-disclosure agreement. This is important for profit. Among other things, it enables you to trim development costs by relying on security through obscurity.
With web development, you have to write code to an open standard so that it will run on a wide range of different platforms. That basically means distributing the source code (scripts). That is good for improving the quality of FOSS, but really limits the profitability of your products.
Perl and its descendants (PHP, Ruby, Python, et al) are great for community development projects and are the reason why Microsoft and other traditional software houses are getting beaten up so badly in the markets. There is less and less room for business plans based on the "I know something you can't know" model that was so successful 20 years ago.
At the very least they should be taking all of the user feedback (read: complaints) that they receive on their forums, distilling it into useful bug reports, and passing that information up to the core developers to be fixed at the level where it can do the most good.
That doesn't make sense.
Canonical is quite likely not contributing code because the cost of doing so is too much during this start-up phase when they are working at a net loss. Doing the first hard and costly 80% of the debugging work on each current issue and passing that upstream for someone else to get the credit for the patches is very likely not in their best interest, either.
The hard part of bug squashing is sorting through all the reports to find the durn things. Actually coding the fixes is trivial by comparison. And that's true when a formal bug reporting form is in use. Trying to work from complaints posted in a forum would be awful. There are reasons why bug report forms came about.
But it does look to me like the Ubuntu forums are easily available for anyone who wants to extract and distill useful bug reports from them. So have at it!
Unfortunately i'm sure there's a much more mundane explanation for the phenomenon which they will eventually discover.
You are probably right.
However when I read an article like this one, I do wonder what sort of interstellar drive would produce an exhaust or wake with these kinds of characteristics? It seems to me that today's astronomical discussions should include some comments on the possibility that what is being observed out there might not be a natural phenomenon.
Parent post, and the articles that are raising this "controversy", are comparing apples to oranges.
Red Hat and Canonical are both commercial entities. But Red Hat has been profitable for several years; Canonical has yet to generate a profit-- it is still in its start-up phase. One cannot expect a business that is still completely dependent on an angel's generosity for financing (thank you, Mark) to be as active in the community as a business that has a positive cash flow. Red Hat has the resources to pay some of its personnel to shepherd its developments through the upstream process. Canonical has chosen to put its limited resources to other tasks.
Also note that all the Ubuntu's distros are supported by Canonical. But Red Hat split off Fedora sometime before Ubuntu became a player. Red Hat now has no free-as-in-beer offerings that compare with the Ubuntu distros.
And in any case, Ubuntu's primary contribution is in meeting the needs of newcomers to Linux and FOSS, and it does that exceedingly well. Better than any other distro has done before. Proselytizing-- raising the public's awareness about Linux and FOSS-- is generally recognized as a valid mode of contributing to FOSS. One that is especially appropriate for individuals and businesses who are not in a position to contribute code. Ubuntu has done more in this area than Red Hat has ever done.
The spokesman from Red Hat who apparently set up this "controversy" should be ashamed of his words. A significant portion of Red Hat's new clients are from businesses whose managers tested the Linux waters with Ubuntu on their personal machines, and then went to Red Hat for its expertise in supporting enterprise systems. Ubuntu does not compete with Red Hat and is not riding Red Hat's coattails; Ubuntu's existence drives business to Red Hat.
Nota Bene: In 2008, Mark Shuttleworth guessed that Canonical might become "cash flow positive" in 3 to 5 years. The recession has probably pushed that forward somewhat.
Above should be modded up (I would do so, but I have already made a comment on this thread).
Any government imposed ADA regulations will conflict directly with the right of every USA citizen to exercise free speech. However organizations like corporations and government agencies do not have a right to free speech-- that is only for individuals. So there are ways that an effective set of ADA regulations could be crafted that avoids the First Amendment issues.
The ADA regulations will need to recognize classes of web pages. Government agencies and large corporations can and should be held to absolute requirements, while individuals publishing with their own resources should be exempt from all ADA regulations. There should also be some intermediate classes since soccer club web sites, small businesses, businesses that sell web development services, and so on should be slotted in between these two extremes.
It will be messy, but if it was going to be simple we would not need government to regulate it.
Federal websites were already supposed to be in compliance with most of the ADA regulations that are likely to come out of this, though sadly enough www.regulations.gov proves that this has not been well enforced.
So we can hope that the cost for bringing agencies like National Institute for Health, Veterans Administration, and so on into compliance will be minimal.
Those responsible for www.regulations.gov should be rounded up and brought to trial for the crime of unconscious conspiracy to commit treason.
They do the USA a tremendous disservice that would be laughable, if it wasn't so stupidly, pathetically detrimental to the public welfare.
I do believe it's good for disabled folks to have an alternate method of accessing a website.
I agree.
I hope this doesn't add red tape to the creation of websites that are only designed for a visual experience (e.g. flash based graphical interfaces).
I agree with that, too.
Further, I am terribly concerned that some ways of implementing these ADA requirements could act as a choke on the right of USA citizens to free speech. Publishing on the web should be available to any USA citizen who can master the (rather low) skills needed to write a basic HTML web page. No one should be excluded from the web because they cannot afford to make their writing compliant with ANY government-imposed standard.
I'm thinking that the only good way to implement the ADA requirements will be to develop classes of web pages that have different minimal levels of compliance. At the top, all Federal and State web pages have to be fully compliant in every detail; at the bottom, any web page produced solely by an individual would not have to meet any of the requirements. In between would be classes for smaller governments (counties, cities, school districts, etc), businesses, businesses that sell web page development services, volunteer groups, and so on.
The same standards cannot be applied to the local soccer club's web site which is run by one the soccer moms, and a Federal agency web site like the Veterans Administration.
So classes something like this:
Federal and State web sites: Fully compliant with ADA, and additionally proofed to assure that they are readable by the 10% of men who are colorblind, and readable (with browser magnification) by the large percentage of those over 55 years old who require large typefaces because of macular degeneration or other visual defects. Also required to place identifying information in HTML comments on each delivered page (described below).
Very large for-profit businesses (with 1,000 employees, or producing gross revenues exceeding 100 million USD per year, or something like that): same requirements as above
Web development firms: same as above
Local governments (city, county, school district, etc): partial compliance with ADA, colorblindness, etc, allowing exemptions on some clauses where compliance would add a significant cost to their operations
Small businesses (under 100 employees with net profits below 100,000 USD per year): exempt from regulations when they can demonstrate that 80% or more of their web site is developed by their direct employee(s). And so long as none of the web pages contain the identifying comments required by certain other classes of users (to prevent end-runs around the requirements).
Volunteer organizations: also exempt, under same conditions as small businesses
Individuals: always exempt
The identifying comments mentioned would contain the developer and the date of development (useful in allowing old pages to be grandfathered forward when ADA requirements are changed, even if they are not in compliance with the changes). The identifiers might also help in determining whether content was plagiarized, or is outdated-- but those are not ADA concerns. However the ADA could make it a felony to alter or remove identifying comments, which would probably have some nice secondary benefits, like decreasing plagiarism of commercial works.
There would obviously be a need to periodically review the ADA requirements and the class structure. We can expect rapid technological improvements in both the web and in assistive devices for disabled individuals, and the ADA regulations should all be reviewed at least every decade.
I was rather bothered that www.regulations.gov itself is heavily dependent on.swf files to convey its information. It also appears nearly blank if scripts are not allowed.
I sent a complaint to the web master. This is just effing wrong.
MS is still making a hell load of money, it just that they aren't growing.
No reason to tear apart the company.
Um, no.
From the beginning, Microsoft's success was based on rapidly identifying emerging markets of technically naive consumers and ruthlessly exploiting their naivety by pruning out anything that would slow their market penetration. Such as quality control (beyond what was necessary for a good showroom appearance) or solid engineering (hence all the problems with malware). The developers dance was all about getting everyone on the bandwagon before anyone knew enough to critically assess the sorry state of that wagon's mechanicals, or the lack of roadway that was in front of it.
Microsoft has now coasted past the top of its trajectory because-- surprise, surprise-- their old markets have all matured. Everyone interested in buying new software either knows a bit about what they are doing or knows somebody knowledgeable to go to. Microsoft has been desperately looking for other naive markets to expand into (gaming, phones, etc) but now it is just too easy for potential customers to google product comparisons.
Possibly Microsoft has a proper enough angle and enough momentum to achieve some kind of orbit, if it is guided by someone who knows how to do that kind of rescue. Otherwise its ballistic descent will be at least as spectacular as its meteoric rise. Do mind that you stay clear of ground zero-- that thing may not burn up completely on its downward journey.
Myself, I don't think that a potty-mouthed monkey dancer has the necessary experience to nudge that mother of a ship into a stable orbit. But I'm not on Microsoft's Board of Directors, or even a stockholder, so my opinion doesn't matter.
Parent post describes one way to do photography. It works, if your subject will give you the time do to the lengthy set-ups, and everything goes just right. It doesn't work for commercial photography. It doesn't work for the photographer attempting to capture candid shots. It doesn't work for wildlife photography. It doesn't work for several other types of photography
And it is a little too OCD for my taste.
There are two simple rules to becoming a good photographer:
Take lots of photos
Become ruthless in throwing out those that don't meet your highest standards
Everything else is just gravy. Learn your camera, learn your software, learn the media you will use in presenting your work (printer and paper, or web page image, etc). Learn all that stuff, and you'll get to where 3 or 4 of every hundred shots you take are keepers. If you get to where 10 out of 100 are keepers, you are passing up too many opportunities to experiment. You are no longer doing Art.
Now rescuing a poor but irreplaceable image is another story. Maybe the composition sucks and the technical quality is abysmal but if it is the only photo you've got of Junior's first steps, then of course you do everything you know how to make it as good as it can be made.
Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.
No, that's only correct if you are not taking the digital process through to its conclusion. Straight out of the camera, the digital image is rarely going to look as good as the slide that has been processed through a professional photo lab. But after proper treatment with the histogram and curves tools in the digital darkroom of your choice, the digital image will provide more color realism than Kodachrome slides usually did (they were consistently a little warmer and saturated than reality was). If you want the Kodachrome look, you can get that too: adjust to realistic, then use the HSV tool to boost the saturation a tad and add a slight red shift.
I grant that digital photography cannot match wet photography in absolute resolution, but it is in many ways better than wet photography for color, presuming that the photographer learns to use the software tools.
While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography. In addition to the cost of the cameras and dark room equipment, there was also the cost of the 99 throw-away exposures for every good shot, and the thousands of lousy shots taken to get the experience to reliably get at least 1 good shot out of 100.
With digital photography the amateur can easily afford to take a 1,000 shots to end up with one really good one. He then can process it through a digital darkroom for no additional cost, and also recover some acceptable images from some of his almost-good shots to boot. He faces a lower absolute top limit on quality since digital photography does not have the color gamut or the fine resolution that is possible with wet photography, but he can get a lot closer to that limit than he could ever have managed in wet photography. He is immensely better off with digital photography than he could ever have been with wet photography.
I started getting serious about photography in high school, with my first Minolta range-finding 35 mm camera. It was a love-hate relationship for 25 years: I loved the concept of photography but hated that I could never manage to put together the darkroom that was needed to get anywhere with it. Early on, I could not afford the equipment. When I could afford the equipment, I found that dealing with the chemistries raised issues of child-proofing and environmental impacts that I did not want to get into.
I do miss wet photography, but with the mixed feelings one has for a cherished childhood dream that realistically could never have happened, no matter what. I am very happy with my digital cameras, general computer equipment, and The GIMP, especially now that my monitor and printer have the same color space.
A couple of wing mounted cameras, some simple image recognition software, and range-finding by triangulation would do it. At a guess, processing 10 images a second would be easy to do, and would provide more than adequate rate-of-approach and wind-drift info. Probably do the software in Forth on silicon, which would be particularly fitting since Forth was initially developed as an optical robotic control language.
On further reflection (pun intended), add a low power, low weight pointing laser to paint a dot of light on the wire, and home in by triangulation on the dot. That would reduce the image recognition processing to a trivial exercise.
Passwords can be stored in written form fairly safely, if one stegs[1] them properly.
At home, make up a bunch of fictitious business cards for plumbers, roofers, dog walking services, etc, each with a name or slogan that serves as a reminder of their use, and the password itself in the numbers and words of the street address. Intermix with some legitimate business cards and keep them in a flip box by the computer.
At work, do the same thing with fake certificates, thank you notes, and so on and put them on your Love-Me Wall[2].
----
[1]Steg: As a verb, to hide information within within something commonplace and unrelated. As a noun, the information that was stegged, while it is in the hidden state.
[2]This is an example of a "purloined steg".
Is this for real?? Maybe; maybe not. The only sure thing is indefinite.
Oh, as to pneumonic password retrieval: that's when if you blow in its ear, it will follow you anywhere. Ancient technology from the simpler era of 1960s American television.
Excellent! You, sir, have done a wonderfully good job of presenting the fine concept involved in certain TLAs.
Now there is only the problem of getting foo and bar out of apps written in C or C++. While that would probably lead to fewer fine apps, the world would be a better place.
I think of it as further evidence of the Gaia theory. For G.T. to work on a daily basis, there has to be communication between neighbors in each ecosystem that would involve all the behavioral attributes that can be conveniently lumped under the broad concept of "empathy". Such empathy between individuals in any of the social species should be easily observable. And apparently is, for anyone who chooses to look for it.
Not saying that the demonstration of empathy in non human species is part of a proof of G.T., just that it is consistent with G.T.
I am also asserting that it is less of a mental jump to accept G.T. as a working hypothesis and develop an ethical system on its postulates than it is to develop ethics from existential or materialistic philosophies. But I offer this as a bald assertion with nothing to back it up (except my gut feeling).
The biggest breakthroughs in the history of science were not discoveries of new facts but new interpretations of what everybody already knew (but they had it wrong). Like Galileo and the Sun circling the Earth. Newton and centrifugal force.
Perhaps today's "popular science" has got it wrong, and many of our highly prized traits of human interaction are very basic things we might find across the board in all animals. That would explain a whole bunch of cross-species bonding activities, like people with pets, horses with non-horse travelling companions, bitches nursing kittens, cats nursing puppies. A gorilla who has learned sign language wanting a cat for a pet.
Of course it would also decrease the perceived difference between Man and all other life forms, and thus make it harder to preserve concepts like Man having the God-given right of dominion over all the beasts, or Man having some intrinsic right to change ecosystems, etc. There is a lot of economics invested in Man being uniquely able to experience compassion, or the suffering that is the flip side of that. Imagine a world where no one could stomach pate de fois gras, or veal cutlets....
If I read the original story correctly, this would be a complaint involving multiple users over a definite geographical area (neighborhood), about strong blanket (not intermittent) interference for several hours. Chances are that this is leaking in broad spectrum, not just the 2.4 region. But perhaps I did not read the story correctly. As I recall, I had not yet finished my first pot of coffee.
While this branch of the discussion is technically interesting, I don't think a technical solution that allows pollution to continue unchecked is as appropriate as a political solution of identifying the polluter and requiring him to clean up his act. RF interference, which is probably what is going on, is definitely a form of pollution.
Is there a railroad yard or industrial site that is using remote controlled locomotives or other RC equipment in the neighborhood? The intensity of interference and the consistent schedule suggests something industrial. Possibly something that is designed to function inside a Faraday cage but the cage has been left open. It can seem awful convenient to inexperienced technicians to just leave the cover plate off so they can more quickly do the scheduled inspections and servicing....
I think you've got enough evidence to involve the FCC. So long as they are aware of the timing and do the testing when things are on the fritz, they should be able to either rule out RF interference or find the cause fairly quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
...neutrino flux...
Um, is that the new and improved phlogistin?
It seems to me that these findings challenge the underlying assumptions of randomness in quantum theory. It seems that radioactive decay is not the completely random event that we thought it was; instead it is influenced by its environment. Which opens up the possibility that anything that we perceive to be a random event is nothing more than our perception: a kind of backhand acknowledgement of our degree of ignorance about the conditions that shaped that event.
That undermines a lot more than just cosmology. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics could no longer be thought of as universal; they would at best be mere suggestions that in our experience this is usually the way things seem to go....
Any way you look at it, what these guys discovered is mind-bending stuff. Congratulations to the researchers. This was science at its best: going from "Hey, we're getting funny results here" to doing the grunt work of analyzing all that historical data. It would have been so much easier to just say "That can't be... there must have been some glitch in our equipment on that day." This was Nobel Prize kind of work.
English is currently evolving faster than any language has ever done before. And that is because it is the dominant language on the Internet.
Here are some interesting things to think about:
This is a tremendous influx of foreign influences into English, and striking directly at the very core of the literate communities. Expect to see the language bent and reshaped during your lifetime. It won't break; English has proven itself to be too resilient to get borked by this kind of thing. But it will get bent in some really wild ways, for instance, the verbing of nouns will become so commonplace that the grammarians will need to figure out what the rules for that are. In English, grammar, spelling, and punctuation "rules" have always followed from accepted usage; they have never dictated what is acceptable.
So basically I think TFA has missed the big story as it focuses on the small potatoes of Internet jargons. Mai teh toobz bee wid ya, nao n 4evah moah!
It's a matter of vocabulary.
Until it is useful, it is only data. When it becomes useful, it becomes information.
Information is data that has value in reaching an informed opinion or making an informed decision.
A boat being a hole in the water that you pour money into.
For those of us who can't afford such things, we are in the process of discovering that finding information is no longer the valuable skill that it used to be; now the skills are in demand are in filtering the info to get to what is useful. And that seems to mostly be a matter of anti-informing: deliberately choosing to be ignorant about things that just don't matter.
Of course there is the problem of determining what does matter. But that was probably always the case.
If static languages are better, why is the bulk of web development done with dynamic languages?
I'm aware of two critically important reasons that most developers of proprietary software will not mention:
Perl and its descendants (PHP, Ruby, Python, et al) are great for community development projects and are the reason why Microsoft and other traditional software houses are getting beaten up so badly in the markets. There is less and less room for business plans based on the "I know something you can't know" model that was so successful 20 years ago.
At the very least they should be taking all of the user feedback (read: complaints) that they receive on their forums, distilling it into useful bug reports, and passing that information up to the core developers to be fixed at the level where it can do the most good.
That doesn't make sense.
Canonical is quite likely not contributing code because the cost of doing so is too much during this start-up phase when they are working at a net loss. Doing the first hard and costly 80% of the debugging work on each current issue and passing that upstream for someone else to get the credit for the patches is very likely not in their best interest, either.
The hard part of bug squashing is sorting through all the reports to find the durn things. Actually coding the fixes is trivial by comparison. And that's true when a formal bug reporting form is in use. Trying to work from complaints posted in a forum would be awful. There are reasons why bug report forms came about.
But it does look to me like the Ubuntu forums are easily available for anyone who wants to extract and distill useful bug reports from them. So have at it!
Unfortunately i'm sure there's a much more mundane explanation for the phenomenon which they will eventually discover.
You are probably right.
However when I read an article like this one, I do wonder what sort of interstellar drive would produce an exhaust or wake with these kinds of characteristics? It seems to me that today's astronomical discussions should include some comments on the possibility that what is being observed out there might not be a natural phenomenon.
Parent post, and the articles that are raising this "controversy", are comparing apples to oranges.
Red Hat and Canonical are both commercial entities. But Red Hat has been profitable for several years; Canonical has yet to generate a profit-- it is still in its start-up phase. One cannot expect a business that is still completely dependent on an angel's generosity for financing (thank you, Mark) to be as active in the community as a business that has a positive cash flow. Red Hat has the resources to pay some of its personnel to shepherd its developments through the upstream process. Canonical has chosen to put its limited resources to other tasks.
Also note that all the Ubuntu's distros are supported by Canonical. But Red Hat split off Fedora sometime before Ubuntu became a player. Red Hat now has no free-as-in-beer offerings that compare with the Ubuntu distros.
And in any case, Ubuntu's primary contribution is in meeting the needs of newcomers to Linux and FOSS, and it does that exceedingly well. Better than any other distro has done before. Proselytizing-- raising the public's awareness about Linux and FOSS-- is generally recognized as a valid mode of contributing to FOSS. One that is especially appropriate for individuals and businesses who are not in a position to contribute code. Ubuntu has done more in this area than Red Hat has ever done.
The spokesman from Red Hat who apparently set up this "controversy" should be ashamed of his words. A significant portion of Red Hat's new clients are from businesses whose managers tested the Linux waters with Ubuntu on their personal machines, and then went to Red Hat for its expertise in supporting enterprise systems. Ubuntu does not compete with Red Hat and is not riding Red Hat's coattails; Ubuntu's existence drives business to Red Hat.
Nota Bene: In 2008, Mark Shuttleworth guessed that Canonical might become "cash flow positive" in 3 to 5 years. The recession has probably pushed that forward somewhat.
Above should be modded up (I would do so, but I have already made a comment on this thread).
Any government imposed ADA regulations will conflict directly with the right of every USA citizen to exercise free speech. However organizations like corporations and government agencies do not have a right to free speech-- that is only for individuals. So there are ways that an effective set of ADA regulations could be crafted that avoids the First Amendment issues.
The ADA regulations will need to recognize classes of web pages. Government agencies and large corporations can and should be held to absolute requirements, while individuals publishing with their own resources should be exempt from all ADA regulations. There should also be some intermediate classes since soccer club web sites, small businesses, businesses that sell web development services, and so on should be slotted in between these two extremes.
It will be messy, but if it was going to be simple we would not need government to regulate it.
Federal websites were already supposed to be in compliance with most of the ADA regulations that are likely to come out of this, though sadly enough www.regulations.gov proves that this has not been well enforced.
So we can hope that the cost for bringing agencies like National Institute for Health, Veterans Administration, and so on into compliance will be minimal.
Those responsible for www.regulations.gov should be rounded up and brought to trial for the crime of unconscious conspiracy to commit treason.
They do the USA a tremendous disservice that would be laughable, if it wasn't so stupidly, pathetically detrimental to the public welfare.
I do believe it's good for disabled folks to have an alternate method of accessing a website.
I agree.
I hope this doesn't add red tape to the creation of websites that are only designed for a visual experience (e.g. flash based graphical interfaces).
I agree with that, too.
Further, I am terribly concerned that some ways of implementing these ADA requirements could act as a choke on the right of USA citizens to free speech. Publishing on the web should be available to any USA citizen who can master the (rather low) skills needed to write a basic HTML web page. No one should be excluded from the web because they cannot afford to make their writing compliant with ANY government-imposed standard.
I'm thinking that the only good way to implement the ADA requirements will be to develop classes of web pages that have different minimal levels of compliance. At the top, all Federal and State web pages have to be fully compliant in every detail; at the bottom, any web page produced solely by an individual would not have to meet any of the requirements. In between would be classes for smaller governments (counties, cities, school districts, etc), businesses, businesses that sell web page development services, volunteer groups, and so on.
The same standards cannot be applied to the local soccer club's web site which is run by one the soccer moms, and a Federal agency web site like the Veterans Administration.
So classes something like this:
The identifying comments mentioned would contain the developer and the date of development (useful in allowing old pages to be grandfathered forward when ADA requirements are changed, even if they are not in compliance with the changes). The identifiers might also help in determining whether content was plagiarized, or is outdated-- but those are not ADA concerns. However the ADA could make it a felony to alter or remove identifying comments, which would probably have some nice secondary benefits, like decreasing plagiarism of commercial works.
There would obviously be a need to periodically review the ADA requirements and the class structure. We can expect rapid technological improvements in both the web and in assistive devices for disabled individuals, and the ADA regulations should all be reviewed at least every decade.
I was rather bothered that www.regulations.gov itself is heavily dependent on .swf files to convey its information. It also appears nearly blank if scripts are not allowed.
I sent a complaint to the web master. This is just effing wrong.
MS is still making a hell load of money, it just that they aren't growing. No reason to tear apart the company.
Um, no.
From the beginning, Microsoft's success was based on rapidly identifying emerging markets of technically naive consumers and ruthlessly exploiting their naivety by pruning out anything that would slow their market penetration. Such as quality control (beyond what was necessary for a good showroom appearance) or solid engineering (hence all the problems with malware). The developers dance was all about getting everyone on the bandwagon before anyone knew enough to critically assess the sorry state of that wagon's mechanicals, or the lack of roadway that was in front of it.
Microsoft has now coasted past the top of its trajectory because-- surprise, surprise-- their old markets have all matured. Everyone interested in buying new software either knows a bit about what they are doing or knows somebody knowledgeable to go to. Microsoft has been desperately looking for other naive markets to expand into (gaming, phones, etc) but now it is just too easy for potential customers to google product comparisons.
Possibly Microsoft has a proper enough angle and enough momentum to achieve some kind of orbit, if it is guided by someone who knows how to do that kind of rescue. Otherwise its ballistic descent will be at least as spectacular as its meteoric rise. Do mind that you stay clear of ground zero-- that thing may not burn up completely on its downward journey.
Myself, I don't think that a potty-mouthed monkey dancer has the necessary experience to nudge that mother of a ship into a stable orbit. But I'm not on Microsoft's Board of Directors, or even a stockholder, so my opinion doesn't matter.
Parent post describes one way to do photography. It works, if your subject will give you the time do to the lengthy set-ups, and everything goes just right. It doesn't work for commercial photography. It doesn't work for the photographer attempting to capture candid shots. It doesn't work for wildlife photography. It doesn't work for several other types of photography
And it is a little too OCD for my taste.
There are two simple rules to becoming a good photographer:
Everything else is just gravy. Learn your camera, learn your software, learn the media you will use in presenting your work (printer and paper, or web page image, etc). Learn all that stuff, and you'll get to where 3 or 4 of every hundred shots you take are keepers. If you get to where 10 out of 100 are keepers, you are passing up too many opportunities to experiment. You are no longer doing Art.
Now rescuing a poor but irreplaceable image is another story. Maybe the composition sucks and the technical quality is abysmal but if it is the only photo you've got of Junior's first steps, then of course you do everything you know how to make it as good as it can be made.
Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.
No, that's only correct if you are not taking the digital process through to its conclusion. Straight out of the camera, the digital image is rarely going to look as good as the slide that has been processed through a professional photo lab. But after proper treatment with the histogram and curves tools in the digital darkroom of your choice, the digital image will provide more color realism than Kodachrome slides usually did (they were consistently a little warmer and saturated than reality was). If you want the Kodachrome look, you can get that too: adjust to realistic, then use the HSV tool to boost the saturation a tad and add a slight red shift.
I grant that digital photography cannot match wet photography in absolute resolution, but it is in many ways better than wet photography for color, presuming that the photographer learns to use the software tools.
While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography. In addition to the cost of the cameras and dark room equipment, there was also the cost of the 99 throw-away exposures for every good shot, and the thousands of lousy shots taken to get the experience to reliably get at least 1 good shot out of 100.
With digital photography the amateur can easily afford to take a 1,000 shots to end up with one really good one. He then can process it through a digital darkroom for no additional cost, and also recover some acceptable images from some of his almost-good shots to boot. He faces a lower absolute top limit on quality since digital photography does not have the color gamut or the fine resolution that is possible with wet photography, but he can get a lot closer to that limit than he could ever have managed in wet photography. He is immensely better off with digital photography than he could ever have been with wet photography.
I started getting serious about photography in high school, with my first Minolta range-finding 35 mm camera. It was a love-hate relationship for 25 years: I loved the concept of photography but hated that I could never manage to put together the darkroom that was needed to get anywhere with it. Early on, I could not afford the equipment. When I could afford the equipment, I found that dealing with the chemistries raised issues of child-proofing and environmental impacts that I did not want to get into.
I do miss wet photography, but with the mixed feelings one has for a cherished childhood dream that realistically could never have happened, no matter what. I am very happy with my digital cameras, general computer equipment, and The GIMP, especially now that my monitor and printer have the same color space.
As cheap and large as external hard drives have gotten, they are now the most reasonable method for archival storage.
CDs and DVDs still have a place as lowest cost method of wide bandwidth movement of data. But they no longer make sense as archival media.
A couple of wing mounted cameras, some simple image recognition software, and range-finding by triangulation would do it. At a guess, processing 10 images a second would be easy to do, and would provide more than adequate rate-of-approach and wind-drift info. Probably do the software in Forth on silicon, which would be particularly fitting since Forth was initially developed as an optical robotic control language.
On further reflection (pun intended), add a low power, low weight pointing laser to paint a dot of light on the wire, and home in by triangulation on the dot. That would reduce the image recognition processing to a trivial exercise.
Passwords can be stored in written form fairly safely, if one stegs[1] them properly.
At home, make up a bunch of fictitious business cards for plumbers, roofers, dog walking services, etc, each with a name or slogan that serves as a reminder of their use, and the password itself in the numbers and words of the street address. Intermix with some legitimate business cards and keep them in a flip box by the computer.
At work, do the same thing with fake certificates, thank you notes, and so on and put them on your Love-Me Wall[2]. ---- [1]Steg: As a verb, to hide information within within something commonplace and unrelated. As a noun, the information that was stegged, while it is in the hidden state. [2]This is an example of a "purloined steg".
Is this for real?? Maybe; maybe not. The only sure thing is indefinite.
Oh, as to pneumonic password retrieval: that's when if you blow in its ear, it will follow you anywhere. Ancient technology from the simpler era of 1960s American television.
Excellent! You, sir, have done a wonderfully good job of presenting the fine concept involved in certain TLAs.
Now there is only the problem of getting foo and bar out of apps written in C or C++. While that would probably lead to fewer fine apps, the world would be a better place.
I think of it as further evidence of the Gaia theory. For G.T. to work on a daily basis, there has to be communication between neighbors in each ecosystem that would involve all the behavioral attributes that can be conveniently lumped under the broad concept of "empathy". Such empathy between individuals in any of the social species should be easily observable. And apparently is, for anyone who chooses to look for it.
Not saying that the demonstration of empathy in non human species is part of a proof of G.T., just that it is consistent with G.T.
I am also asserting that it is less of a mental jump to accept G.T. as a working hypothesis and develop an ethical system on its postulates than it is to develop ethics from existential or materialistic philosophies. But I offer this as a bald assertion with nothing to back it up (except my gut feeling).
Not to be contrary, but what does empathy have to do with intelligence?
Well, both belong to that small set of words that are critical to a rational understanding of the Universe but impossible to define.
[Going for both "funny" AND "insightful" with this one.]
Ah-ha! Mod parent up; that was insightful.
The biggest breakthroughs in the history of science were not discoveries of new facts but new interpretations of what everybody already knew (but they had it wrong). Like Galileo and the Sun circling the Earth. Newton and centrifugal force.
Perhaps today's "popular science" has got it wrong, and many of our highly prized traits of human interaction are very basic things we might find across the board in all animals. That would explain a whole bunch of cross-species bonding activities, like people with pets, horses with non-horse travelling companions, bitches nursing kittens, cats nursing puppies. A gorilla who has learned sign language wanting a cat for a pet.
Of course it would also decrease the perceived difference between Man and all other life forms, and thus make it harder to preserve concepts like Man having the God-given right of dominion over all the beasts, or Man having some intrinsic right to change ecosystems, etc. There is a lot of economics invested in Man being uniquely able to experience compassion, or the suffering that is the flip side of that. Imagine a world where no one could stomach pate de fois gras, or veal cutlets....
If I read the original story correctly, this would be a complaint involving multiple users over a definite geographical area (neighborhood), about strong blanket (not intermittent) interference for several hours. Chances are that this is leaking in broad spectrum, not just the 2.4 region. But perhaps I did not read the story correctly. As I recall, I had not yet finished my first pot of coffee.
While this branch of the discussion is technically interesting, I don't think a technical solution that allows pollution to continue unchecked is as appropriate as a political solution of identifying the polluter and requiring him to clean up his act. RF interference, which is probably what is going on, is definitely a form of pollution.
Is there a railroad yard or industrial site that is using remote controlled locomotives or other RC equipment in the neighborhood? The intensity of interference and the consistent schedule suggests something industrial. Possibly something that is designed to function inside a Faraday cage but the cage has been left open. It can seem awful convenient to inexperienced technicians to just leave the cover plate off so they can more quickly do the scheduled inspections and servicing....
I think you've got enough evidence to involve the FCC. So long as they are aware of the timing and do the testing when things are on the fritz, they should be able to either rule out RF interference or find the cause fairly quickly.