Correction: Apple at least rethinks usability properly.
Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon... Pah!
Do you really think the ribbon was anything to do with usability? As far as I can see, it was about having a patentable UI element that OO.o and its ilk couldn't copy.
That is rather easy to say, probably within the next 100 years and we will be the cause ourselves, either war or famine, or sickness, but in any case the cause will be greed and overpopulation.
More likely the Yellowstone super-volcano, as others have pointed out. But either way, the world will still blame the Americans, and the Americans will still blame whoever was president at the time.
The only widely circulated book talking of a flat earth that I can think of would be the bible (the bit about climbing on a mountain so high, one could see the four corners of the earth)
And that couldn't possibly have been meant figuratively, could it?
He is kind of right, but I would say the relative challenge of understanding the kernel code is far greater than the social challenge of getting involved. I mean, you can't expect to just sign up to lklm and say, "Hey guys, assign me a project!" Why would they even believe that you can handle it?
So they assign you to documenting something. If you do it, it shows you at least understand what's going on, and the project has gained that rarest of open-source comoddities, documentation. If you fail, you've not broken anything so it's pretty much just your own time you've wasted.
I agree, but we need to be careful about how we define "better". Security specialists will tend to define "better" as "more secure", no matter what happens to convenience or civil liberties. Passengers are more likely to consider "better" to be "more convenient", although they will want security to be adequate. Livertarians are likely to consider "better" to be "more liberty" or "more equality", with less regard for convenience or security. "Better" might be a case of finding a balance between conflicting interests that is more acceptable to the population as a whole, but in general it will be improving one or more criteria without significant detriment to the others.
The issue with profiling is what happens to the innocent that unfortunately match a profile. They are likely to be significantly inconvenienced, and the more we trust the profiling the worse it is likely to get for the false positives. The usual tendency of civilisation is to spread risk more evenly (eg, insurance) as well as reducing it. Unless it is extraordinarily well implemented, profiling goes against that trend, making things better for the majority but making things very much worse for an unlucky few.
If the brain becomes better at something simply through hormonal changes, you would think there's something it becomes worse at at the same time. Apparently not for women who transcend these conventional stereotypes.
From the referenced article: "The hormones do have a downside. Some new mothers suffer from depression and in rare cases, even psychosis. Research at Tufts University and elsewhere suggests some potential animal models and endocrinological mechanisms for postpartum mental distress, broadly defined. It suggests that hormones are to blame: an acute pull-back, addict-like, from the rich concentrations of steroids that characterize pregnancy may play a role in the severity of postpartum reactions."
Add to that classic male mental strengths of spatial relationships, detail, and attention focus and you do get a more balanced picture. But it's all averages, it tells us nothing about any specific man or woman.
I think you're missing the point. If he knew this would happen, he probably wouldn't've done it at all. It was just him venting in a moment of frustration.
How the police responded so quickly is beyond me, though...
Firstly, it implies that the fuzz over in the UK are listening pretty much non stop to Twitter to be able to react so quickly.
Or somebody who read the tweet reported it. In fact, from the Telegraph areticle (linked from the RA), police acted on "a tip-off from a member of the public".
Secondly, it implies that they are showing utterly no concept of applying common sense to what they do when they take what is clearly that sort of vent "oh fuck it, I am so sick of this weather!". Seriously guys, use your heads, can anyone really be that pissed at the WEATHER that they blow something up? I doubt it. I really fucking doubt it.
Can any normal person? I agree. Are there psychos out there who just might? Sadly, yes. And "You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!" does sound rather like a psycho. Britain has been the subject of extended terror campaigns, and I suspect that the British police are more familiar with what a genuine terror threat sounds like than the average/. reader. Unfortunately any measurement system is going to suffer type 1 errors (I hope innocence is still the null hypothesis). What matters is how they're dealt with if they're subsequently identified. That's not yet the case here: "He has been bailed pending further investigations." The police are not yet convinced if it was a joke, or if it was whether it was a harmless one (too many people think that hoaxing the emergency services is a "joke"; I expect that some think that real bomb hoaxes are), and it has not yet been tested by a court (as it should be if reasonable doubt remains). The real test will come if it does all turn out to be a misunderstanding. Wil he just be taken on one side and told not to be such an asshole (er, sorry, "will it be explained to him that the police need to investigate such matters, because after all, how would it have been if the threat had been real and he had carried it out? It would be helpful if he kept that in mind in future"), or will things like the airport ban remain in place?
I know that I arose from a woman called Joan and a man called Vincent. My cousin didn't have a mother called Joan or a father called Vincent, threfore she can't possibly exist. Or maybe, just maybe, just because things happened one way once doesn't mean that's the only way they can happen.
I'm curious if, based on previous evidence that water existed on Mars at some point before it hit the deep-freeze, does this essentially suggest that water = life everywhere?
Hint. Top Cat had whiskers, Garfield has whiskers. Does this essentially suggest that whiskers=cats everywhere?
Odd how you need to inject this racist conjecture into the thread. Feeling insecure? Ashamed that we all have genes that likely come from Africa, but you're ashamed of that small penis? Tsk tsk.
Ashamed that we all have genes that likely come from Africa, but you're ashamed of that small penis? Tsk tsk.
Now now. I understand there is a difference, but an average of 1/8 inch isn't all that much on which to build a racial stereotype.
The notable exception to this smorgasbord of achievement is Africans and Americans of African ancestry. Africans do poorly in comprehending advanced mathematics, which is prerequisite to the work that leads to amazing achievements in science and technology.
But they have better parties, so I wonder who are really the smart ones.
That's not to say that science is right, of course. It might really be the case that nothing can ever be proved wrong. We'll never know! (Although, since doing science might work, and not doing science won't, the smart thing is still to do science. Although I can't prove that.
Only if you can actualy do experiments (that deliver meaningful results). Until then the math is an "interpretation", not a "theorem". In some cases that's the best we can hope for; the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM describes what happens when the system isn't observed (with "observed" defined in such a way that any relevant experiment would be an observation). It's still good science. Although no experiment can distinguish between the Many Worlds interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation (because they both have a taboo on observation), experiment could still potentially falsify both.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: Apple at least rethinks usability properly. Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon... Pah!
Do you really think the ribbon was anything to do with usability? As far as I can see, it was about having a patentable UI element that OO.o and its ilk couldn't copy.
That is rather easy to say, probably within the next 100 years and we will be the cause ourselves, either war or famine, or sickness, but in any case the cause will be greed and overpopulation.
More likely the Yellowstone super-volcano, as others have pointed out. But either way, the world will still blame the Americans, and the Americans will still blame whoever was president at the time.
The only widely circulated book talking of a flat earth that I can think of would be the bible (the bit about climbing on a mountain so high, one could see the four corners of the earth)
And that couldn't possibly have been meant figuratively, could it?
Nope. They only affect relatively small (numerically) pockets of humanity.
So the newspapers are finally realizing what Slashdotters have known for 10 years -- nobody RTFAs.
Um, ever hear of a little thing called the Slashdot effect? Post your website URL, let's see if we'll read it :-D
Oh, we click on them, sure, but we don't read them.
He is kind of right, but I would say the relative challenge of understanding the kernel code is far greater than the social challenge of getting involved. I mean, you can't expect to just sign up to lklm and say, "Hey guys, assign me a project!" Why would they even believe that you can handle it?
So they assign you to documenting something. If you do it, it shows you at least understand what's going on, and the project has gained that rarest of open-source comoddities, documentation. If you fail, you've not broken anything so it's pretty much just your own time you've wasted.
Actual security specialists understand that the idea of "more secure" means less "convenience" or less "civil liberties" is a false dichotomy.
The best of them do, yes. But I have attended aviation security working groups, and can assure you that not all of them do.
Now we're talking! ;-)
but it can always work better.
I agree, but we need to be careful about how we define "better". Security specialists will tend to define "better" as "more secure", no matter what happens to convenience or civil liberties. Passengers are more likely to consider "better" to be "more convenient", although they will want security to be adequate. Livertarians are likely to consider "better" to be "more liberty" or "more equality", with less regard for convenience or security. "Better" might be a case of finding a balance between conflicting interests that is more acceptable to the population as a whole, but in general it will be improving one or more criteria without significant detriment to the others.
The issue with profiling is what happens to the innocent that unfortunately match a profile. They are likely to be significantly inconvenienced, and the more we trust the profiling the worse it is likely to get for the false positives. The usual tendency of civilisation is to spread risk more evenly (eg, insurance) as well as reducing it. Unless it is extraordinarily well implemented, profiling goes against that trend, making things better for the majority but making things very much worse for an unlucky few.
If the brain becomes better at something simply through hormonal changes, you would think there's something it becomes worse at at the same time. Apparently not for women who transcend these conventional stereotypes.
From the referenced article: "The hormones do have a downside. Some new mothers suffer from depression and in rare cases, even psychosis. Research at Tufts University and elsewhere suggests some potential animal models and endocrinological mechanisms for postpartum mental distress, broadly defined. It suggests that hormones are to blame: an acute pull-back, addict-like, from the rich concentrations of steroids that characterize pregnancy may play a role in the severity of postpartum reactions."
Add to that classic male mental strengths of spatial relationships, detail, and attention focus and you do get a more balanced picture. But it's all averages, it tells us nothing about any specific man or woman.
I think you're missing the point. If he knew this would happen, he probably wouldn't've done it at all. It was just him venting in a moment of frustration. How the police responded so quickly is beyond me, though...
Firstly, it implies that the fuzz over in the UK are listening pretty much non stop to Twitter to be able to react so quickly.
Or somebody who read the tweet reported it. In fact, from the Telegraph areticle (linked from the RA), police acted on "a tip-off from a member of the public".
Secondly, it implies that they are showing utterly no concept of applying common sense to what they do when they take what is clearly that sort of vent "oh fuck it, I am so sick of this weather!". Seriously guys, use your heads, can anyone really be that pissed at the WEATHER that they blow something up? I doubt it. I really fucking doubt it.
Can any normal person? I agree. Are there psychos out there who just might? Sadly, yes. And "You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!" does sound rather like a psycho. Britain has been the subject of extended terror campaigns, and I suspect that the British police are more familiar with what a genuine terror threat sounds like than the average /. reader. Unfortunately any measurement system is going to suffer type 1 errors (I hope innocence is still the null hypothesis). What matters is how they're dealt with if they're subsequently identified. That's not yet the case here: "He has been bailed pending further investigations." The police are not yet convinced if it was a joke, or if it was whether it was a harmless one (too many people think that hoaxing the emergency services is a "joke"; I expect that some think that real bomb hoaxes are), and it has not yet been tested by a court (as it should be if reasonable doubt remains). The real test will come if it does all turn out to be a misunderstanding. Wil he just be taken on one side and told not to be such an asshole (er, sorry, "will it be explained to him that the police need to investigate such matters, because after all, how would it have been if the threat had been real and he had carried it out? It would be helpful if he kept that in mind in future"), or will things like the airport ban remain in place?
Well, I've certainly been around for a long long year. Will that do?
Please allow me to introduce myself...
I know that I arose from a woman called Joan and a man called Vincent. My cousin didn't have a mother called Joan or a father called Vincent, threfore she can't possibly exist. Or maybe, just maybe, just because things happened one way once doesn't mean that's the only way they can happen.
I'm curious if, based on previous evidence that water existed on Mars at some point before it hit the deep-freeze, does this essentially suggest that water = life everywhere?
Hint. Top Cat had whiskers, Garfield has whiskers. Does this essentially suggest that whiskers=cats everywhere?
Your average girl is more attractive than most porn stars.
True, but your average girl won't let the average /. reader watch her doing any of that stuff.
And precisely what were you planning to do with that strap-on?
Odd how you need to inject this racist conjecture into the thread. Feeling insecure? Ashamed that we all have genes that likely come from Africa, but you're ashamed of that small penis? Tsk tsk.
Ashamed that we all have genes that likely come from Africa, but you're ashamed of that small penis? Tsk tsk.
Now now. I understand there is a difference, but an average of 1/8 inch isn't all that much on which to build a racial stereotype.
The notable exception to this smorgasbord of achievement is Africans and Americans of African ancestry. Africans do poorly in comprehending advanced mathematics, which is prerequisite to the work that leads to amazing achievements in science and technology.
But they have better parties, so I wonder who are really the smart ones.
Sometimes one has to just chuck Ockham to the wind and do the experiment anyway.
Gosh dang it, I always thought it was Velcro.
You forgot the racial, political and homophobic trolls. Something many of us try to do, of course.
Rather than post completely uninformed comments on the subject, leave that to people in the field.
But how can they post completely uninformed comments? They're informed! No, sorry, but it's down to us!
That's not to say that science is right, of course. It might really be the case that nothing can ever be proved wrong. We'll never know! (Although, since doing science might work, and not doing science won't, the smart thing is still to do science. Although I can't prove that.
Only if you can actualy do experiments (that deliver meaningful results). Until then the math is an "interpretation", not a "theorem". In some cases that's the best we can hope for; the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM describes what happens when the system isn't observed (with "observed" defined in such a way that any relevant experiment would be an observation). It's still good science. Although no experiment can distinguish between the Many Worlds interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation (because they both have a taboo on observation), experiment could still potentially falsify both.