Even IF they fully implement the video tag correctly, who exactly will reformat all their existing video collections in AVI / FLV into open source format (.OGG ?), and what benefit will it give them. Absolutely none.
And for sure, even if and when the standard *is* finalized, that won't be before all the big players have bartered with the comittee for concessions on alternative allowable formats, and we'll end up with a video tag that needs to play not just open source formats but also AVI, WMV, FLV and all the popular formats of the day.
Provided of course in the next N years, an even better video compression format comes along and despite the agreed upon video tag, we'll end up with an <ms-video> tag, an <flv-video> tag etc etc.
Please try consulting the actual spec. HTML5 does not define or require any particular format for video or audio. It's open-ended and works with any format the browser supports, just like <img> works with any image format. Currently Firefox supports only Ogg Theora, Chrome supports both Theora and H.264, and Safari uses the system codecs. You can provide the video in multiple formats, and the browser will use the first one that it supports. Not flawless, but nothing like the chaos you hypothesize.
In an ideal world a lot of things would be great... unfortunately we live in the real world where innovators cannot wait 5 years for technology to be debated, formalized, bartered, compromised and generally muddied into yet another worthless piece of documentation that is out of date before it's ever released.
That is exactly how the HTML5 development process does not work. HTML5 is developed primarily by the WHATWG. The WHATWG has nine members who decide everything, and eight of them are employed by one of the four major non-MS browser vendors: Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera. The spec is completely implementer-driven, and an overriding priority is to match what actual implementations do. If a single major implementer refuses to implement a feature, it's dropped from the spec (like mandatory Theora support). Meanwhile, the actual spec text is updated constantly in response to implementation and authoring feedback. You can even follow the changes on Twitter.
In point of fact, the WHATWG is more or less a place for implementers to coordinate on what they want to implement. The limiting factor is not specification speed: Ian Hickson writes and edits enormous amounts of spec text as quickly as you might wish. The limiting factor is implementation, vendors actually writing the code to implement the spec. That cost would be about the same even if every vendor made up its own implementation for everything. Currently the spec is in Last Call and mostly static, because it's waiting for implementations to catch up before adding more features.
Anyway, in the end, HTML5 brings one thing to the table that Flash can never hope to by itself: competition. You may think Flash works pretty well, but it will never be able to stand up to the feature set you get from five companies ruthlessly competing with each other for market share over years. Or even if it does, it will only because it's forced to innovate or die – because of HTML5. Even the greatest fan of Flash should welcome HTML5 as a strong incentive for Adobe to make it even better.
There was a draft standard of HTML5 released January 2008.
The first drafts of HTML5 were published by the WHATWG in 2004. 2008 was only when the W3C got involved. The W3C's endorsement has made little to no practical difference to the development or implementation of HTML5 so far – Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera were all implementing based on the WHATWG spec to begin with, and the W3C editor is the same as the WHATWG editor. The W3C was brought in to the picture as a political measure, and its involvement shouldn't be viewed as a milestone from a spec perspective.
Climate debate aside, we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists. Any suggestions?
How about this: all papers that anyone submits to any journal are made available online exactly as submitted (probably only to the journal's subscribers). Those that are reviewed have the reviewers' comments posted along with the submission, in full. Scientists who want to know what the journal's editors and peer reviewers think is good, or cite peer-reviewed results, can stick to reading the journal proper. Anyone who wants to double-check the reviewing methods can analyze the full data set using whatever method they like. Should be very easy to do; any journals up for it?
Obviously, yes, as a rule. In much of the country you'd have no hope of getting to college if you couldn't drive a vehicle (unless you dorm, but not all students do).
^ Deary, I.J.; Irwing, P.; Der, G; Bates, T.C. (2005). "Brother-sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979". Intelligence 35:451-456.
There you go, have a citation for male IQ results having a higher variance than female.
You realize that the ^ at the beginning of the line gives away the fact that you copied that cite verbatim from Wikipedia, right? I'm guessing without reading it to see whether it actually said what Wikipedia claimed?
Nearly the entirety of biological evidence is against it being an artifact of culture.
He said "genetic selection due to culture". I.e., that it is genetic, but the genetic difference arose due to mate-choosing preferences – sexual selection. I don't have any comment on whether this explanation is correct, though.
So do condoms. Also, the one study that showed anti-HIV effects was found to have used cherry picked population samples.
You mean like the three randomized controlled trials in Africa with multiple thousands of men that all were stopped early because they showed such a dramatic benefit to the circumcised group? Meaning, 50% the infection rate of the control group? See, e.g., here. The results might not be as drastic outside of Africa, due to different transmission vectors for HIV, but circumcision is definitely an effective measure to cut HIV in some important cases.
What's always bothered me is that people insist on doing it to children. If it's so helpful, then parents would naturally wait until the child is old enough to choose for himself. I've always suspected that the reason it's done to children is that it's a part of culture, and that parents know that when the child gets old enough to choose for himself, their reaction will be "Oh, HELL no.".
Parents already make far more momentous decisions for their kids, which can be equally irreversible. They can leave the kid watching TV all day so they get bored by real life, feed them only junk food so they get diabetes, and send them to a terrible school where they don't get an education and end up stuck with a menial and low-paying job for the rest of their life. But circumcising them is somehow a crime against humanity.
Yeah, people only circumcise their kids for cultural reasons. People also only object to circumcision for cultural reasons. It causes no more demonstrable harm than a ten-year-old girl getting her ears pierced. Any possible harm anyone can come up with is speculative, and certainly doesn't significantly outweigh its possible benefits. But some people freak out about it because of their ideologies and biases.
I've released BSD-licensed programs that depend on Apache-licensed libraries. The GPL is not compatible with the Apache license, so I can't change the license of my code to the GPL, even if I want to.
Even better, pretty soon we'll have clueless noobs with their new netbooks running Google's ChromeOS (which they don't know is really Linux because Google is doing everything they can to avoid the "L" word). Now they can get pwned too!!
Maybe you could explain how this kind of exploit will work on an OS where the user can't actually install anything that doesn't run in a draconian sandbox?
What's more, because US treaties are backed by the power of the Constitution, they are very difficult to repeal later down the road if they turn out to be a bad idea, or, as is more often the case, the other governments back out of the treaty and leave the US holding the bag. Few countries put as much force of law behind treaties as the US. This is also one of the reasons the US never signed on to Kyoto, because it was assumed that the other countries wouldn't be able to make the ambitious targets and would quietly back out, whereas the US would be stuck with it.
Not true. Treaties ratified under the Treaty Clause can be superseded by ordinary law. See the Head Money Cases (emphasis added):
The Constitution of the United States places such provisions as these in the same category as other laws of Congress by its declaration that
this Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made or which shall be made under authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.
. . . there is nothing in this law which makes it irrepealable or unchangeable. The Constitution gives it no superiority over an act of Congress in this respect, which may be repealed or modified by an act of a later date. . . .
A treaty is made by the President and the Senate. Statutes are made by the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The addition of the latter body to the other two in making a law certainly does not render it less entitled to respect in the matter of its repeal or modification than a treaty made by the other two. If there be any difference in this regard, it would seem to be in favor of an act in which all three of the bodies participate. And such is, in fact, the case in a declaration of war, which must be made by Congress and which, when made, usually suspends or destroys existing treaties between the nations thus at war.
In short, we are of opinion that, so far as a treaty made by the United States with any foreign nation can become the subject of judicial cognizance in the courts of this country, it is subject to such acts as Congress may pass for its enforcement, modification, or repeal.
In fact, treaties can be even easier to repeal than laws. There have been multiple occasions when the President has decided to withdraw from a treaty without even asking Congress – like Bush withdrawing from the ABM treaty.
On top of that, you can always implement a treaty in the form of an ordinary law. Treaties can be passed as "non-self-executing", in which case they have no legal force themselves at all. For instance, the United States ratified the Berne Convention, but 17 USC 104(c) says "No right or interest in a work eligible for protection under this title may be claimed by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of the Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. . .." Instead, the Berne Convention was implemented as the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which was passed by both houses of Congress as a regular bill.
A treaty that we're a party to might not even necessarily have been implemented. I recall reading a Supreme Court case (sadly, I can't remember which) where a treaty we were party to would have prevented the execution of a Mexican citizen, but the Court dismissed the appeal, on the basis that the treaty was not passed as self-executing and wasn't implemented by any law. Thus although the international community recognized us as a party to the treaty, our own courts found it unenforceable under domestic law. The Supreme Court basically sai
I though there was a UN convention that prohibited extradition to countries that practice torture or won't give a person due process.
The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says, in Section 3.1, "No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." The treaty permits extradition to a state that practices torture as long as you think the particular person you're extraditing won't be tortured. Similarly, I believe EU countries generally won't extradite anyone to the US if they would face capital punishment, but will extradite them if the US agrees that they won't be executed.
Given the diplomatic repercussions if this guy were tortured (i.e., the UK not extraditing anyone anymore), it's unlikely. It really wouldn't be worth it for the US to torture him, given that they gain nothing (it's not like he knows anything) and stand to lose a lot. It might happen, I guess, but I doubt it's likely enough to violate the Convention. Although IANAL, of course.
I'm not aware of any UN convention that prohibits extradition to countries that won't give a person "due process", but one might exist. UK law is more relevant here, though, since most treaties of this sort don't have intranational dispute resolution mechanisms. The Convention against Torture provides a means of arbitration in Article 30, but only if there's a dispute between states, not if a citizen thinks his own state is violating the treaty. So if the UK and EU decide the extradition doesn't violate any laws or treaties, there's no further recourse in practice.
The thing is, many webapps are actually DB bound despite appearing to be webserver bound, because they store most of their state in the database (and nearly the rest of it at the user's browser).
Now this means you are shifting the burden of locking, serialization and other tricky stuff to the DB.
When you do that, you can have as many identical webservers as you want (scaling "horizontally")- since the state is all at the DB (and most of the rest in the user's browser).
Okay, in that sense I agree that databases are the major optimization concern for web apps, at least from a scalability perspective. It's worth pointing out, though, that this doesn't save you from latency issues, only scalability issues. If your PHP app takes 500 ms to generate a page, it doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at it, users' experience is going to be considerably worse than it should be. On Wikipedia, large pages can take literally 20 seconds or more of CPU time to generate – although this is hidden by two different layers of caching, so it's not usually visible to most users.
It doesn't really matter in the web as 90% of the time is spent hitting the database.
Depends on the application. Wikipedia is much more CPU-bound than database-bound. Look at the database (db*) vs. application (srv*) servers lists here: there are at least five times as many app servers as DB servers, at a quick glance. A typical request that hits the backend spends (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in the database, hundreds in PHP. Try formatting 500 or 5000 rows of a table when each one takes 1 ms – because yes, that happens when you try writing nice abstract formatting stuff in PHP.
The website I administer is also much more CPU- than database-bound. Generating the front page of the forums is 602 ms, with only 14 ms in MySQL and the rest in PHP. This is a >20G database, by the way.
I really don't see how any typical web app could spend more than a few tens of milliseconds per request at the database, unless it's poorly written (too much/too little normalization, bad indexes, etc.). But it's very easy to do hundreds of ms of pure computation in a slow language like PHP, even if your code is well-written. Are most web apps really DB-bound? I just haven't seen it, personally.
So you have free speech by you can't freely say the the holocaust didn't happen, In most free countries free speech is the right to say anything no matter how ignorant with out penalty under the law. There are two exemptions yelling fire in a theater and calling for violence, everything else is protected.
That's not true. There are a multitude of exceptions even under US law, which has the strongest free speech protections in the world. The general rule is that to restrict speech, the government must show that the measure is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. Some types of speech that are illegal in the US, randomly off the top of my head: defamation; false advertising; inciting crime; cigarette advertising in many contexts; obscenity; lying in court or to police or a grand jury; breaking a non-disclosure agreement; speech that infringes copyright or other intellectual property rights; dissemination of classified information; providing aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war; and lots more. The Wikipedia article has more discussion.
However, it should be said that purely political speech is nearly always protected in the US, unless it directly advocates violence or something like that. Restrictions on free speech in the US are nearly always content-neutral when it comes to politics or ideology (although not so much commercial or other types of speech).
This is the objectionable thing to Americans, I think. Germans are prohibiting some portion of the population from even trying to even convince anyone they're right. If that's allowed, a majority of the population can prevent minority views from even being heard or considered. It might be Nazism today, but it could easily be anything else tomorrow (witness prosecution of some people speaking out against Islam). Cigarette companies might not be able to advertise as much as they'd like in the US, but they can try to convince people to change their minds about that.
I have always wondered why MMO's actually have a more dynamic world. It doesn't even need to be something where you can interact with everything, but where your actions have actual effects on the world.
Try EVE Online. It's a space setting, not fantasy, but it's in line with this. You use spaceships to gather ore, which gives you money. You can build things, make capital investments, form corporations with private armies, sell shares in your corporation. Or be employed by someone else's corporation, or become a pirate, or whatever. I haven't played it, but my impression is most things are run by players, and it pulls it off pretty successfully.
As a key product in a proprietary OS, why would you want to run nightly builds of IE? With Firefox my browser may be unstable, but at least the rest of my system stays stable, but with IE a lot of Windows components use Trident and that isn't going to be a good thing.
WebKit is heavily used in OS X too, AFAIK, but they still provide nightlies. It doesn't replace the existing version on your system, it's an extra one that you can manually run as part of specific programs. So you'd use the nightly build to test, but other programs would keep using the standard system build.
It also doesn't have to be called "Internet Explorer". It could be called something different, like "Trident Development Version" or something. Firefox nightlies are called Minefield.
Plus, with Firefox if you file a bug they appreciate that and generally fix it right away
You must have only filed really trivial or critical bugs, then. I've filed five bugs. One is WORKSFORME (turned out to be a broken font), one is DUPLICATE (to a bug rated critical and open since 2002), and the other three remain open. No project under the sun is able to fix most reported bugs quickly; there are just too many things to do.
Chromium is not Chrome. They may share a common tree, but they aren't the same either. Chrome may be built from a snapshot of the chromium tree, but that doesn't give you nightlies of chrome.
Okay, what kind of logic is that? A nightly is by definition a daily build that's a snapshot of the development trunk, which official releases are eventually built off of. The Chrome developers themselves use Chromium for development. It's a nightly build in every sense of the term.
Even if for some reason you don't buy that logic, Chrome has a Dev Channel, which releases official Google-branded Chrome builds every week or so. So, it still has weekly builds.
That gives us three out of four non-IE browsers with nightly or weekly builds, and the fourth has nightlies of the most important component (in particular, the only component that's interesting to web developers). What were you saying again?
Enlightment is BSD licensed. You can't just change it to LGPL-3.
No, but you can redistribute a version that contains LGPLv3 changes, and not say which parts you changed. Then the work may as well be only LGPLv3. You can argue that theoretically, some of the code is BSD and not LGPL, but you have to satisfy the LGPL's requirements for the whole thing and that means you automatically satisfy the BSD requirements (as those are strictly weaker), so the distinction is academic.
Of course, none of this changes the status of the original version of Enlightenment from its original source.
The top 1000 clients of google likely piss away a million $ a day in coffee alone.
Wikipedia is a top 10 site, maybe even top 5, but the Wikimedia Foundation made only $8,658,006 in revenue for FY2008–9. And come on, we're talking top 1000 here, not top ten. I've run an Alexa top 10,000 site on under $5,000 a year. (Currently it's more like 15–25k, it's a gaming site and popularity fluctuates with release cycles.) It doesn't cost much to run a big website.
If you are responsible for the GUI on a large project, then no. Calculus isn't gonna do you a bit of good. If you're optimizing DB calls for a project with thousands of concurrent connections, then yes, you do need that. Advanced math is needed for *some* types of development, not all.
Why do you need any math to optimize DB calls? You just need to know how your database works. Figure out what queries are expensive, do appropriate caching or distribution across multiple machines, etc. You need math for things like computer graphics, not database administration. I say this as a grad student in math who also knows quite a lot about Wikipedia's database architecture decisions and has done some DB optimization on a smaller website – 22G database, 50ish req/s – but to be fair, I wouldn't call myself a real DBA.
Um, how? Democracy doesn't just mean voting, it means control by the general population. The UN isn't controlled directly or indirectly by the general population. It's controlled by states, some of which are controlled by their citizens and some not. The UN doesn't care one way or the other.
Even if the UN's members were all democratic (so it was indirectly responsible to the people of the world), it wouldn't be particularly democratic itself. The General Assembly does things by straight vote, yes, but even more detached from actual proportional representation than the US Senate: Antigua gets the same number of votes as India. And other parts of the UN, like the Security Council, arbitrarily give much more power to some members.
So I don't know why you're saying the UN is a democratic organization. Although I agree that you can have a democracy that's not what we'd think of as a free country.
As for the "IE 6 was better", wow what were/are you smoking? I used Netscape browsers in this timeframe and they worked pretty well.
Yes, pretty well. But at a certain point (somewhere between IE5 and 6), IE just gave a better user experience. My entire household used Netscape until we reluctantly realized it just wasn't as good as IE anymore. Microsoft poured tons of money into IE in this timeframe, making it the best browser out there by far.
And yes, obviously packaging it with their OS helped. But not as much as the fact that they were a multibillion dollar corporation competing against tiny Netscape. Wikipedia's article on IE says that in the late 1990s, Microsoft spent $100 million a year on IE and had over 1,000 people working on it. Not surprising that it very quickly blew all competition out of the water.
Not only did IE6 get even further away from established standards
IE6 implemented web standards (like CSS) significantly better than its predecessors. It fixed the box model bug, for instance – IE5 didn't even handle the width and height properties correctly. Yes, IE6's CSS model was still fundamentally broken (only IE8 really implements CSS properly), but it was certainly much better than before.
but it added a host of new problems for web developers. It greatly reduced security for anyone who used it and it was directly responsible or contributed to some of the largest mass outages and virus outbreaks in history -- fails including drive-by downloads, ActiveX controls, lack of confirmation for actions, and a tight coupling with the kernel were nasty nasty for everyone in the business to deal with.
Sure. Nevertheless, from a simple user's perspective, it was better than Netscape. I wish I could drag out an old New York Times Circuits review that I distinctly remember praising the new IE version as better than Netscape, but it's nearly a decade ago, so it's not likely I could find it.
Microsoft still hasn't done much to solve the additional amount of code necessary to render standards-based pages properly even in IE8. Try taking the ACID tests, which reveal just a small inkling of the many many Internet Explorer browsers' issues. Try using "IE7 compatibility mode" in IE8 and you will see it's not the same. Now we have to code for how many different browsers? It's called a standard for a reason, something that MS doesn't see value in following.
I'm a web developer. You don't have to tell me what a burden IE is. Nevertheless, in 2002 or so, IE6 was the best browser out there. It was surpassed by Firefox a couple of years later, but only because IE stood still while its competitors advanced.
Excel was better than Quattro, and I'm sorry, Word was better than Word Perfect for Windows, by far. My favorite Word Process was Samna AmiPro, which, probably would have ruled them all had Lotus not bought them and screwed it up.
I mostly agree with you – anyone who thinks IE6 wasn't simply better than contemporary Netscape, for instance, is seriously confused – but I have to disagree with Word vs. WordPerfect. My experience was always that Word and WordPerfect were more or less identical, with a few random advantages one way or the other (like WordPerfect's view source thing). I remember reading reviews that said exactly that, too. But everyone uses Word, so eventually my household switched.
Modern flash is pretty much a rich graphics API wrapped around a cleaned up Javascript. It's a pretty nice language and environment, actually; but just inappropriately overused in many websites. I'm skeptical that html video extensions will replace it, because I don't think the html encoding will have nearly the versatility of a general purpose programming language. Will it be able to, for instance, stream recommended alternative videos or advertisements while the video is paused, for instance? It's not that I want that, but a lot of site owners do.
Of course, using JavaScript. Events are fired whenever anything interesting happens to the video (like pausing or resuming). You can create <video> elements in JavaScript just like any HTML elements. JavaScript can be used to pause, resume, seek, or anything else you might like. You can look through the whole API in the HTML5 spec. You can overlay things on top of <video> using regular old CSS, unlike plugins. Etc., etc.
<video> lets you use the full power of a general programming language, namely JavaScript. Unlike Flash videos, however, you can interact with HTML5 videos using JavaScript and CSS – the same technologies you need to know anyway to create the whole rest of your page. Not having to learn Flash is a big long-term advantage as long as authors need to know CSS and JS anyway.
To anyone who thinks that sites will inevitably use Flash instead of <video> for obfuscation, tell me: why does almost no one use Flash instead of <img> for obfuscation today? You could do it – but you could also do obfuscation using straight HTML+CSS+JS, and that's a lot easier than bothering to load up Flash.
You mention that Flash should be replaced by open video standards for video applications. However, I frequently find video and even more so video live streams to be very fragile when the browser uses the systems video player. I then often just download the video and play it externally, because the internal video player doesn't respond and I don't know why.
No one says browsers will use the system video player. In fact, they pretty much can't launch a separate app to play the video, because they have to expose a sophisticated JavaScript API that requires them to know exactly how the video is playing. (Of course, you could always manually open the video in a separate app if you like, just like an image.)
View this in Firefox 3.5 and tell me how smoothly it works for you: <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/>. In my experience, <video> is as smooth and hitch-free as you could ask for, although I've run into some teething troubles (like a Theora video from Mozilla having desynced sound on Chrome).
Slashdot Mirror
Even IF they fully implement the video tag correctly, who exactly will reformat all their existing video collections in AVI / FLV into open source format (.OGG ?), and what benefit will it give them. Absolutely none.
And for sure, even if and when the standard *is* finalized, that won't be before all the big players have bartered with the comittee for concessions on alternative allowable formats, and we'll end up with a video tag that needs to play not just open source formats but also AVI, WMV, FLV and all the popular formats of the day.
Provided of course in the next N years, an even better video compression format comes along and despite the agreed upon video tag, we'll end up with an <ms-video> tag, an <flv-video> tag etc etc.
Please try consulting the actual spec. HTML5 does not define or require any particular format for video or audio. It's open-ended and works with any format the browser supports, just like <img> works with any image format. Currently Firefox supports only Ogg Theora, Chrome supports both Theora and H.264, and Safari uses the system codecs. You can provide the video in multiple formats, and the browser will use the first one that it supports. Not flawless, but nothing like the chaos you hypothesize.
In an ideal world a lot of things would be great ... unfortunately we live in the real world where innovators cannot wait 5 years for technology to be debated, formalized, bartered, compromised and generally muddied into yet another worthless piece of documentation that is out of date before it's ever released.
That is exactly how the HTML5 development process does not work. HTML5 is developed primarily by the WHATWG. The WHATWG has nine members who decide everything, and eight of them are employed by one of the four major non-MS browser vendors: Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera. The spec is completely implementer-driven, and an overriding priority is to match what actual implementations do. If a single major implementer refuses to implement a feature, it's dropped from the spec (like mandatory Theora support). Meanwhile, the actual spec text is updated constantly in response to implementation and authoring feedback. You can even follow the changes on Twitter.
In point of fact, the WHATWG is more or less a place for implementers to coordinate on what they want to implement. The limiting factor is not specification speed: Ian Hickson writes and edits enormous amounts of spec text as quickly as you might wish. The limiting factor is implementation, vendors actually writing the code to implement the spec. That cost would be about the same even if every vendor made up its own implementation for everything. Currently the spec is in Last Call and mostly static, because it's waiting for implementations to catch up before adding more features.
Anyway, in the end, HTML5 brings one thing to the table that Flash can never hope to by itself: competition. You may think Flash works pretty well, but it will never be able to stand up to the feature set you get from five companies ruthlessly competing with each other for market share over years. Or even if it does, it will only because it's forced to innovate or die – because of HTML5. Even the greatest fan of Flash should welcome HTML5 as a strong incentive for Adobe to make it even better.
There was a draft standard of HTML5 released January 2008.
The first drafts of HTML5 were published by the WHATWG in 2004. 2008 was only when the W3C got involved. The W3C's endorsement has made little to no practical difference to the development or implementation of HTML5 so far – Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera were all implementing based on the WHATWG spec to begin with, and the W3C editor is the same as the WHATWG editor. The W3C was brought in to the picture as a political measure, and its involvement shouldn't be viewed as a milestone from a spec perspective.
Climate debate aside, we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists. Any suggestions?
How about this: all papers that anyone submits to any journal are made available online exactly as submitted (probably only to the journal's subscribers). Those that are reviewed have the reviewers' comments posted along with the submission, in full. Scientists who want to know what the journal's editors and peer reviewers think is good, or cite peer-reviewed results, can stick to reading the journal proper. Anyone who wants to double-check the reviewing methods can analyze the full data set using whatever method they like. Should be very easy to do; any journals up for it?
But you can drive a vehicle before you enter?
Obviously, yes, as a rule. In much of the country you'd have no hope of getting to college if you couldn't drive a vehicle (unless you dorm, but not all students do).
^ Deary, I.J.; Irwing, P.; Der, G; Bates, T.C. (2005). "Brother-sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979". Intelligence 35:451-456.
There you go, have a citation for male IQ results having a higher variance than female.
You realize that the ^ at the beginning of the line gives away the fact that you copied that cite verbatim from Wikipedia, right? I'm guessing without reading it to see whether it actually said what Wikipedia claimed?
Nearly the entirety of biological evidence is against it being an artifact of culture.
He said "genetic selection due to culture". I.e., that it is genetic, but the genetic difference arose due to mate-choosing preferences – sexual selection. I don't have any comment on whether this explanation is correct, though.
So do condoms. Also, the one study that showed anti-HIV effects was found to have used cherry picked population samples.
You mean like the three randomized controlled trials in Africa with multiple thousands of men that all were stopped early because they showed such a dramatic benefit to the circumcised group? Meaning, 50% the infection rate of the control group? See, e.g., here. The results might not be as drastic outside of Africa, due to different transmission vectors for HIV, but circumcision is definitely an effective measure to cut HIV in some important cases.
What's always bothered me is that people insist on doing it to children. If it's so helpful, then parents would naturally wait until the child is old enough to choose for himself. I've always suspected that the reason it's done to children is that it's a part of culture, and that parents know that when the child gets old enough to choose for himself, their reaction will be "Oh, HELL no.".
Parents already make far more momentous decisions for their kids, which can be equally irreversible. They can leave the kid watching TV all day so they get bored by real life, feed them only junk food so they get diabetes, and send them to a terrible school where they don't get an education and end up stuck with a menial and low-paying job for the rest of their life. But circumcising them is somehow a crime against humanity.
Yeah, people only circumcise their kids for cultural reasons. People also only object to circumcision for cultural reasons. It causes no more demonstrable harm than a ten-year-old girl getting her ears pierced. Any possible harm anyone can come up with is speculative, and certainly doesn't significantly outweigh its possible benefits. But some people freak out about it because of their ideologies and biases.
I've released BSD-licensed programs that depend on Apache-licensed libraries. The GPL is not compatible with the Apache license, so I can't change the license of my code to the GPL, even if I want to.
The APLv2 is compatible with the GPLv3. The CDDL would be a better example (e.g., BSD with ZFS).
Even better, pretty soon we'll have clueless noobs with their new netbooks running Google's ChromeOS (which they don't know is really Linux because Google is doing everything they can to avoid the "L" word). Now they can get pwned too!!
Maybe you could explain how this kind of exploit will work on an OS where the user can't actually install anything that doesn't run in a draconian sandbox?
What's more, because US treaties are backed by the power of the Constitution, they are very difficult to repeal later down the road if they turn out to be a bad idea, or, as is more often the case, the other governments back out of the treaty and leave the US holding the bag. Few countries put as much force of law behind treaties as the US. This is also one of the reasons the US never signed on to Kyoto, because it was assumed that the other countries wouldn't be able to make the ambitious targets and would quietly back out, whereas the US would be stuck with it.
Not true. Treaties ratified under the Treaty Clause can be superseded by ordinary law. See the Head Money Cases (emphasis added):
In fact, treaties can be even easier to repeal than laws. There have been multiple occasions when the President has decided to withdraw from a treaty without even asking Congress – like Bush withdrawing from the ABM treaty.
On top of that, you can always implement a treaty in the form of an ordinary law. Treaties can be passed as "non-self-executing", in which case they have no legal force themselves at all. For instance, the United States ratified the Berne Convention, but 17 USC 104(c) says "No right or interest in a work eligible for protection under this title may be claimed by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of the Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. . . ." Instead, the Berne Convention was implemented as the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which was passed by both houses of Congress as a regular bill.
A treaty that we're a party to might not even necessarily have been implemented. I recall reading a Supreme Court case (sadly, I can't remember which) where a treaty we were party to would have prevented the execution of a Mexican citizen, but the Court dismissed the appeal, on the basis that the treaty was not passed as self-executing and wasn't implemented by any law. Thus although the international community recognized us as a party to the treaty, our own courts found it unenforceable under domestic law. The Supreme Court basically sai
I though there was a UN convention that prohibited extradition to countries that practice torture or won't give a person due process.
The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says, in Section 3.1, "No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." The treaty permits extradition to a state that practices torture as long as you think the particular person you're extraditing won't be tortured. Similarly, I believe EU countries generally won't extradite anyone to the US if they would face capital punishment, but will extradite them if the US agrees that they won't be executed.
Given the diplomatic repercussions if this guy were tortured (i.e., the UK not extraditing anyone anymore), it's unlikely. It really wouldn't be worth it for the US to torture him, given that they gain nothing (it's not like he knows anything) and stand to lose a lot. It might happen, I guess, but I doubt it's likely enough to violate the Convention. Although IANAL, of course.
I'm not aware of any UN convention that prohibits extradition to countries that won't give a person "due process", but one might exist. UK law is more relevant here, though, since most treaties of this sort don't have intranational dispute resolution mechanisms. The Convention against Torture provides a means of arbitration in Article 30, but only if there's a dispute between states, not if a citizen thinks his own state is violating the treaty. So if the UK and EU decide the extradition doesn't violate any laws or treaties, there's no further recourse in practice.
The thing is, many webapps are actually DB bound despite appearing to be webserver bound, because they store most of their state in the database (and nearly the rest of it at the user's browser).
Now this means you are shifting the burden of locking, serialization and other tricky stuff to the DB.
When you do that, you can have as many identical webservers as you want (scaling "horizontally")- since the state is all at the DB (and most of the rest in the user's browser).
Okay, in that sense I agree that databases are the major optimization concern for web apps, at least from a scalability perspective. It's worth pointing out, though, that this doesn't save you from latency issues, only scalability issues. If your PHP app takes 500 ms to generate a page, it doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at it, users' experience is going to be considerably worse than it should be. On Wikipedia, large pages can take literally 20 seconds or more of CPU time to generate – although this is hidden by two different layers of caching, so it's not usually visible to most users.
It doesn't really matter in the web as 90% of the time is spent hitting the database.
Depends on the application. Wikipedia is much more CPU-bound than database-bound. Look at the database (db*) vs. application (srv*) servers lists here: there are at least five times as many app servers as DB servers, at a quick glance. A typical request that hits the backend spends (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in the database, hundreds in PHP. Try formatting 500 or 5000 rows of a table when each one takes 1 ms – because yes, that happens when you try writing nice abstract formatting stuff in PHP.
The website I administer is also much more CPU- than database-bound. Generating the front page of the forums is 602 ms, with only 14 ms in MySQL and the rest in PHP. This is a >20G database, by the way.
I really don't see how any typical web app could spend more than a few tens of milliseconds per request at the database, unless it's poorly written (too much/too little normalization, bad indexes, etc.). But it's very easy to do hundreds of ms of pure computation in a slow language like PHP, even if your code is well-written. Are most web apps really DB-bound? I just haven't seen it, personally.
So you have free speech by you can't freely say the the holocaust didn't happen, In most free countries free speech is the right to say anything no matter how ignorant with out penalty under the law. There are two exemptions yelling fire in a theater and calling for violence, everything else is protected.
That's not true. There are a multitude of exceptions even under US law, which has the strongest free speech protections in the world. The general rule is that to restrict speech, the government must show that the measure is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. Some types of speech that are illegal in the US, randomly off the top of my head: defamation; false advertising; inciting crime; cigarette advertising in many contexts; obscenity; lying in court or to police or a grand jury; breaking a non-disclosure agreement; speech that infringes copyright or other intellectual property rights; dissemination of classified information; providing aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war; and lots more. The Wikipedia article has more discussion.
However, it should be said that purely political speech is nearly always protected in the US, unless it directly advocates violence or something like that. Restrictions on free speech in the US are nearly always content-neutral when it comes to politics or ideology (although not so much commercial or other types of speech).
This is the objectionable thing to Americans, I think. Germans are prohibiting some portion of the population from even trying to even convince anyone they're right. If that's allowed, a majority of the population can prevent minority views from even being heard or considered. It might be Nazism today, but it could easily be anything else tomorrow (witness prosecution of some people speaking out against Islam). Cigarette companies might not be able to advertise as much as they'd like in the US, but they can try to convince people to change their minds about that.
I have always wondered why MMO's actually have a more dynamic world. It doesn't even need to be something where you can interact with everything, but where your actions have actual effects on the world.
Try EVE Online. It's a space setting, not fantasy, but it's in line with this. You use spaceships to gather ore, which gives you money. You can build things, make capital investments, form corporations with private armies, sell shares in your corporation. Or be employed by someone else's corporation, or become a pirate, or whatever. I haven't played it, but my impression is most things are run by players, and it pulls it off pretty successfully.
As a key product in a proprietary OS, why would you want to run nightly builds of IE? With Firefox my browser may be unstable, but at least the rest of my system stays stable, but with IE a lot of Windows components use Trident and that isn't going to be a good thing.
WebKit is heavily used in OS X too, AFAIK, but they still provide nightlies. It doesn't replace the existing version on your system, it's an extra one that you can manually run as part of specific programs. So you'd use the nightly build to test, but other programs would keep using the standard system build.
It also doesn't have to be called "Internet Explorer". It could be called something different, like "Trident Development Version" or something. Firefox nightlies are called Minefield.
Plus, with Firefox if you file a bug they appreciate that and generally fix it right away
You must have only filed really trivial or critical bugs, then. I've filed five bugs. One is WORKSFORME (turned out to be a broken font), one is DUPLICATE (to a bug rated critical and open since 2002), and the other three remain open. No project under the sun is able to fix most reported bugs quickly; there are just too many things to do.
. . . Chromium != Google Chrome. . . .
Chromium is not Chrome. They may share a common tree, but they aren't the same either. Chrome may be built from a snapshot of the chromium tree, but that doesn't give you nightlies of chrome.
Okay, what kind of logic is that? A nightly is by definition a daily build that's a snapshot of the development trunk, which official releases are eventually built off of. The Chrome developers themselves use Chromium for development. It's a nightly build in every sense of the term.
Even if for some reason you don't buy that logic, Chrome has a Dev Channel, which releases official Google-branded Chrome builds every week or so. So, it still has weekly builds.
That gives us three out of four non-IE browsers with nightly or weekly builds, and the fourth has nightlies of the most important component (in particular, the only component that's interesting to web developers). What were you saying again?
Enlightment is BSD licensed. You can't just change it to LGPL-3.
No, but you can redistribute a version that contains LGPLv3 changes, and not say which parts you changed. Then the work may as well be only LGPLv3. You can argue that theoretically, some of the code is BSD and not LGPL, but you have to satisfy the LGPL's requirements for the whole thing and that means you automatically satisfy the BSD requirements (as those are strictly weaker), so the distinction is academic.
Of course, none of this changes the status of the original version of Enlightenment from its original source.
The top 1000 clients of google likely piss away a million $ a day in coffee alone.
Wikipedia is a top 10 site, maybe even top 5, but the Wikimedia Foundation made only $8,658,006 in revenue for FY2008–9. And come on, we're talking top 1000 here, not top ten. I've run an Alexa top 10,000 site on under $5,000 a year. (Currently it's more like 15–25k, it's a gaming site and popularity fluctuates with release cycles.) It doesn't cost much to run a big website.
If you are responsible for the GUI on a large project, then no. Calculus isn't gonna do you a bit of good. If you're optimizing DB calls for a project with thousands of concurrent connections, then yes, you do need that. Advanced math is needed for *some* types of development, not all.
Why do you need any math to optimize DB calls? You just need to know how your database works. Figure out what queries are expensive, do appropriate caching or distribution across multiple machines, etc. You need math for things like computer graphics, not database administration. I say this as a grad student in math who also knows quite a lot about Wikipedia's database architecture decisions and has done some DB optimization on a smaller website – 22G database, 50ish req/s – but to be fair, I wouldn't call myself a real DBA.
The UN is a democratic organization
Um, how? Democracy doesn't just mean voting, it means control by the general population. The UN isn't controlled directly or indirectly by the general population. It's controlled by states, some of which are controlled by their citizens and some not. The UN doesn't care one way or the other.
Even if the UN's members were all democratic (so it was indirectly responsible to the people of the world), it wouldn't be particularly democratic itself. The General Assembly does things by straight vote, yes, but even more detached from actual proportional representation than the US Senate: Antigua gets the same number of votes as India. And other parts of the UN, like the Security Council, arbitrarily give much more power to some members.
So I don't know why you're saying the UN is a democratic organization. Although I agree that you can have a democracy that's not what we'd think of as a free country.
As for the "IE 6 was better", wow what were/are you smoking? I used Netscape browsers in this timeframe and they worked pretty well.
Yes, pretty well. But at a certain point (somewhere between IE5 and 6), IE just gave a better user experience. My entire household used Netscape until we reluctantly realized it just wasn't as good as IE anymore. Microsoft poured tons of money into IE in this timeframe, making it the best browser out there by far.
And yes, obviously packaging it with their OS helped. But not as much as the fact that they were a multibillion dollar corporation competing against tiny Netscape. Wikipedia's article on IE says that in the late 1990s, Microsoft spent $100 million a year on IE and had over 1,000 people working on it. Not surprising that it very quickly blew all competition out of the water.
Not only did IE6 get even further away from established standards
IE6 implemented web standards (like CSS) significantly better than its predecessors. It fixed the box model bug, for instance – IE5 didn't even handle the width and height properties correctly. Yes, IE6's CSS model was still fundamentally broken (only IE8 really implements CSS properly), but it was certainly much better than before.
but it added a host of new problems for web developers. It greatly reduced security for anyone who used it and it was directly responsible or contributed to some of the largest mass outages and virus outbreaks in history -- fails including drive-by downloads, ActiveX controls, lack of confirmation for actions, and a tight coupling with the kernel were nasty nasty for everyone in the business to deal with.
Sure. Nevertheless, from a simple user's perspective, it was better than Netscape. I wish I could drag out an old New York Times Circuits review that I distinctly remember praising the new IE version as better than Netscape, but it's nearly a decade ago, so it's not likely I could find it.
Microsoft still hasn't done much to solve the additional amount of code necessary to render standards-based pages properly even in IE8. Try taking the ACID tests, which reveal just a small inkling of the many many Internet Explorer browsers' issues. Try using "IE7 compatibility mode" in IE8 and you will see it's not the same. Now we have to code for how many different browsers? It's called a standard for a reason, something that MS doesn't see value in following.
I'm a web developer. You don't have to tell me what a burden IE is. Nevertheless, in 2002 or so, IE6 was the best browser out there. It was surpassed by Firefox a couple of years later, but only because IE stood still while its competitors advanced.
Excel was better than Quattro, and I'm sorry, Word was better than Word Perfect for Windows, by far. My favorite Word Process was Samna AmiPro, which, probably would have ruled them all had Lotus not bought them and screwed it up.
I mostly agree with you – anyone who thinks IE6 wasn't simply better than contemporary Netscape, for instance, is seriously confused – but I have to disagree with Word vs. WordPerfect. My experience was always that Word and WordPerfect were more or less identical, with a few random advantages one way or the other (like WordPerfect's view source thing). I remember reading reviews that said exactly that, too. But everyone uses Word, so eventually my household switched.
Modern flash is pretty much a rich graphics API wrapped around a cleaned up Javascript. It's a pretty nice language and environment, actually; but just inappropriately overused in many websites. I'm skeptical that html video extensions will replace it, because I don't think the html encoding will have nearly the versatility of a general purpose programming language. Will it be able to, for instance, stream recommended alternative videos or advertisements while the video is paused, for instance? It's not that I want that, but a lot of site owners do.
Of course, using JavaScript. Events are fired whenever anything interesting happens to the video (like pausing or resuming). You can create <video> elements in JavaScript just like any HTML elements. JavaScript can be used to pause, resume, seek, or anything else you might like. You can look through the whole API in the HTML5 spec. You can overlay things on top of <video> using regular old CSS, unlike plugins. Etc., etc.
<video> lets you use the full power of a general programming language, namely JavaScript. Unlike Flash videos, however, you can interact with HTML5 videos using JavaScript and CSS – the same technologies you need to know anyway to create the whole rest of your page. Not having to learn Flash is a big long-term advantage as long as authors need to know CSS and JS anyway.
To anyone who thinks that sites will inevitably use Flash instead of <video> for obfuscation, tell me: why does almost no one use Flash instead of <img> for obfuscation today? You could do it – but you could also do obfuscation using straight HTML+CSS+JS, and that's a lot easier than bothering to load up Flash.
You mention that Flash should be replaced by open video standards for video applications. However, I frequently find video and even more so video live streams to be very fragile when the browser uses the systems video player. I then often just download the video and play it externally, because the internal video player doesn't respond and I don't know why.
No one says browsers will use the system video player. In fact, they pretty much can't launch a separate app to play the video, because they have to expose a sophisticated JavaScript API that requires them to know exactly how the video is playing. (Of course, you could always manually open the video in a separate app if you like, just like an image.)
View this in Firefox 3.5 and tell me how smoothly it works for you: <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/>. In my experience, <video> is as smooth and hitch-free as you could ask for, although I've run into some teething troubles (like a Theora video from Mozilla having desynced sound on Chrome).