Sounds like this round of PC notebooks is just starting barely, to catch up to Apple's stuff. [shrug] Hopefully this will provide an incentive for Apple to keep coming out with great new notebooks.
Yes, which is why Jackson's remedy -- splitting the company up -- was the only one that made sense in the long run. Microsoft has never complied in any meaningful way with any lesser penalty, and there's no reason to believe they ever will.
Except that the scales involved are more like "grain of sand" and "bowling ball." It is very, very hard to get the grain of sand to a velocity that will affect the bowling ball much.
I think people tend to forget just how much of the Earth is solid (or molten) rock. The entire ecosphere -- from the depths of the ocean to the top of Everest -- is a very thin skin. An asteroid impact that can have a biological effect will still do very little to the planet in a geological or astronomical sense.
Because then it will be up to the author of the Web page to decide what constitutes "adult material," and if he guesses wrong, he goes to prison.
In some cases, it's obvious: porn site operators and the proprietors of sites like rotten.com would be idiots if they didn't use the tags. But there's a huge gray area. Is my personal home page "adult" because it contains a few four-letter words? I don't think so -- but some prosecutor, somewhere, might, and then I've got big problems. What about medical sites which, by their nature, include detailed discussions of human anatomy?
I wouldn't object at all to the creation of a standard (I'd rather have it done by the W3C or some other private entity than the government, but whatever) for "opt-in" kid-safe sites: a clearly published set of rules that says, "If your site does not contain any of the following [naked people / dirty words / etc.] then you are authorized to use this tag." Then the more extreme censorware could look for this tag.
I would still object to public libraries and the like being required to block stuff that doesn't contain the tag, for all kinds of reasons, but it would be a start.
Yeah, pure math is different. Of course, there's a simmering long-term debate on whether math is a science or something else -- a particularly rigorous branch of philosophy, perhaps. The fact that it is vital to almost all modern science is unquestionable, but the question of what math actually is is a vexed one.
You're a troll, but your points deserve to be addressed, because they're such common myths.
The "Darwin == Evolution" meme is so thoroughly imprinted in most people's brains that many creationist types seem to use it as evidence that Darwin produced the idea ex nihilo, and what had been a God-fearing, Creation-believing world suddenly turned atheist, evolutionist, and immoral as a result, leading over the next couple of centuries to world wars, eugenics, the Holocaust, and Bill Clinton. In fact, evolution was a theory that itself evolved, and continues to do so to this day; that's pretty much how scientific theories work. Darwin was an important step -- a major internal node in the phylogenetic tree, one might say -- but he wasn't the be-all and end-all, and has numerous "ancestors" and "descendants" in the history of the theory.
Darwin proposed his "Theory of evolution" in a book. The equivalent of TV as far as popular media at the time goes. Proponents of this claim that it is always being supressed by religious groups, and local government officials.
He did publish it in a book -- after several of the leading scientists of the day, with years of urging, persuaded him to do so. He was reluctant to do so both because he didn't want to be accused of stealing other people's ideas (kind of a Newton/Leibniz thing, only without the monstrous egos involved) and because he was well of the theological shitstorm he was going to unleash. In modern terms, his work was thoroughly peer-reviewed before On the Origin of Species came out.
Science is suppressed by ideological forces, governments and churches not least among them. What marks that crank is when he claims that this suppression is being done in secret. Real suppression -- from the Catholic church and Galileo to fundamentalist Protestantism and Darwin to Stalin and anyone whose science case doubt on Communist ideology -- tends to be very blatant.
Fortunately, they have chosen a theory that can't be proved, and only has anecdotal evidence. Animals 1 000 000 years ago were different, so we must have evolution
Evolutionary biology is an observational science, not (in most cases, microbiology and some botany excepted) an experimental one. Do you consider the existence of other stars besides the Sun to be "anecdotal evidence" because no one can create a star in a lab? And yet we have just as much observational evidence for evolution, and in fact more laboratory evidence.
The only way this could possibly be true is for Darwin to propose a new law of nature!
Darwin was not proposing a new law of nature; the idea of evolution had been around for decades. What he did was to take the hypothesizing of others in the field (e.g. Lamarck) and give it rigorous theoretical underpinnings, much as Einstein took the results of Maxwell's equations to their logical conclusion and explained contradictions in Newtonian mechanics that had bothered generations of physicists before him.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.
This one is important because "big science" is a favorite villain of both pseudoscientists and cost-cutting lawmakers. What the lawmakers don't get -- and the pseudoscientists, I suspect, know but choose to disregards -- is that big science is the way most science gets done these days because the small science has been done. Alexander Fleming leaving a couple of dishes next to each other and discovering penicillin, or Robert Goddard and a team of dedicated fanatics working day and night to build the foundations of space flight, are powerful images; the "Eureka!" moment is every scientist's dream. But in well-established fields such as microbiology and aerospace, those moments have all pretty much happened; we need the big expensive labs with bunches of people working on expensive equipment, because that's how new discoveries and inventions get made.
The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.
Well, yeah, and although he doesn't mention it, "Intelligent Design" fails pretty much every one of his tests. The Biblical-literalist/"Young Earth" creationists at least don't pretend to be scientific -- their beliefs boil down to "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" -- which makes them less dangerous to our educational system. But the ID crowd have done a really good job of getting courts and legislatures to listen to their psuedoscientific babble.
System 7-9 were so awful that I worked for two different companies that were forced to switch to Windows NT.
Wrong comparison. Apple didn't really have a competitor to Windows NT in the pre-OS X days. (A/UX, maybe?) The right comparisons are, roughly, System 6 to Win 3.0, System 7 to Win 3.1 (including its variants, such as WfW), MacOS 8 to Win 95-98, MacOS 9 to Win ME, Mac OS X 10.1 to Win 2K, and Mac OS X 10.2 to Win XP. And by those standards, Macs have indeed always been more reliable.
BTW, I've administered pretty much all the systems I listed above, so I do have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about.
Of course, you're an anonymous troll, so I doubt anything I say will have much of an influence on you, but your post represents a common enough bait-and-switch that I thought it should be addressed.
Yep. It's like someone bitching about Windows and saying, "Any time something goes seriously wrong, you have to drop back into DOS to fix it."
And the truth is, of course, that Macs have always been more reliable than Windows boxes -- back when the complaints about Macs the original poster was making were true, Windows machines suffered from constant "DLL hell" and BSOD on a daily, if not hourly basis. System 7 was far more reliable than Win 3.1, and OS X still beats the hell out of XP. Plus ca change...
I lived in North Dakota for five years courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I have a lot of friends from there (who were actually born there, I mean, rather than being sent there to defend America's borders against... I dunno, the Canadians, I guess.) Of course, we all live in Denver now, so make of that what you will.;)
In any case, ND is reasonably wired. In Minot, which is kind of the archetype of Small Town USA, we got a commercial ISP in 1994, which was about the same time they were springing up all over the place. A couple of years later, there were several local ISP's there, with reasonable competition and good prices. These days, broadband is available for about the same price as everywhere else.
A lot of rural people are really happy to have the Internet. The isolation of a place like that -- especially during the Godawful winter -- can be difficult to imagine if you haven't experienced it. Being able to get online can make it a lot more tolerable. In general, largely for this reason, I think rural America got wired a lot faster than many people imagine.
I don't see a single post defending this obviously frivolous patent, or Apple for filing it. I do, however, see your post assuming that people will defend it.
Methinks this says more about you than about the Slashdot population in general.
Actually, God created government so that government could create the Net. Spam was an unintended consequence -- kinda like when God said, "Let there be beer," I'm sure He wasn't thinking of Budweiser.
It's a joke -- a parody of the cut'n'paste "BSD is dying" trolls that used to pop up in every story that had anything to do with BSD, and many that didn't. You got caught up in a piece of relatively ancient/. history.
Something similar, on a larger scale, happens to the military fairly often. Somebody comes up with a whiz-bang idea for a new weapons system (which may or may not actually do the job) and the DoD says, "Ehhhh, no, we don't really need that, we'd rather spend the money on M16 ammunition for training [or something else equally unsexy]" -- but it turns out that the main contractor for the weapons system is in some influential Senator's home state, and whaddya know, the military is stuck with another white elephant. The utterly worthless Patriot missile system (which may actually have killed more US troops than it ever saved) is an example of this, IIRC.
Um. Looking at the "Prize Biographies" section of the site, I count among the winners five Christians and one practitioner of what seems to be a monotheistic branch of Hindu mysticism. The language on most of the site seems distinctly monotheistic, if not explicitly Christian. Frankly I'd be very surprised if most of the awards didn't go to Christians, since the majority of the judges are Christians themselves.
It's a moot point, anyway; Christianity is no more or less silly than any other religion. And "progress in Spiritual Realities" vs. "progress in religion" is a distinction without a difference.
The reason the Templeton Prize hasn't engendered any major controversy is because religion is off-limits to criticism in mainstream culture and media. Whenever anyone invokes religion (as long as it's a large, popular religion that's being invoked) we're supposed to bow our heads and talk respectfully about "spiritual authority" and "moral leadership" and the like. Science, OTOH, is fair game.
It's not like "to google" means "to knife-rape a cute virgin nun," it means "to search the web," which is exactly what Google does.
As opposed to "to slashdot," which means, effectively, "to launch a DDOS attack" -- which, given current laws, is apparently considered a worse offense than violent sexual assault. Seems to me Google isn't the only well-known Internet entity that has to worry about how their name gets verbed.
"Aspirin" is a special case. IIRC, it used to be an acknowledged trademark in the US -- but that trademark was owned by Bayer, which was a German company. When the US entered WW1, in the wave of anti-German sentiment of the time, the US government decided to revoke the trademark protection Bayer (and other German companies? Dunno...) had enjoyed. So "Aspirin" became a public-domain word in the US. It may still be trademarked in other countries.
Kleenex, Post-It, and Wite-Out (sic) are still trademarked.
I think that's a huge mistake, honestly. I used BBEdit Lite for a couple of years before I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay for BBEdit. It taught me how to use BBEdit generally (it's a very intuitive program overall, but it does have its quirks) and, more importantly, convinced me that a text editor might be worth paying for -- "If the free version does all this, how much more cool stuff will I get if I pay for it?" TextWrangler may be cheaper, but not enough cheaper to create a bunch of "casual" users who will eventually pay for the full version, which was what BBEdit Lite did.
Remember, just because it happens to a woman doesn't mean the motive is at all sexist, much like if it happens to a black its racist or if it happens to a white guy it's justice.
But when it happens to a woman in a highly sexist environment which is very nearly the definition of the "old boys' network," that's the way to bet. This is particularly true since Watson, at least, was a vicious sexist even by the standards of the time. To extend your analogy, it's like looking at the lynching of a black man by the KKK in 1950's Mississippi and saying, "Well, we don't know it was racist..."
Citibank has no interest in "the best interest of its customers." Like any other megacorp, they don't give a shit about you. They're much more concerned about the embarrassment of admitting that their security is worthless than they are about actually keeping people's money safe. The only way to get them to fix this problem is to publicize it as loudly as possible, because then not fixing the problem becomes even more of an embarrassment for them.
Dude. Arguments like those are what slashdot is for. It's what makes slashdot slashdot. If you're looking for meaningful discussion, try a different [notslashdot.org] site...
[shrug] Maybe you see it that way; I don't. I wouldn't spend time on Slashdot if there weren't, IMO, a hell of a lot of meaningful discussion here. But the kneejerk "don't use this, use that" trolls are utterly meaningless discussion. They actually make it harder to have a discussion on the technical merits of OS X vs. Linux, or MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, or Perl vs. PHP, or whatever -- and those are discussions worth having -- because rational posters tend to get lumped in with the kneejerkers.
Some knowledge is immediately, obviously useful. Some isn't useful at the time it's acquired, but turns out to be immensely useful later on. Some is never useful... except in the sense that knowledge is always useful; the ability to gather and pass on knowledge is, as far as we know, one of our defining characteristics as a species.
People want to know if there is or was life on Mars because that would be an amazingly cool piece of knowledge. If you don't understand that... well, I can't help you.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like this round of PC notebooks is just starting barely, to catch up to Apple's stuff. [shrug] Hopefully this will provide an incentive for Apple to keep coming out with great new notebooks.
Yes, which is why Jackson's remedy -- splitting the company up -- was the only one that made sense in the long run. Microsoft has never complied in any meaningful way with any lesser penalty, and there's no reason to believe they ever will.
Except that the scales involved are more like "grain of sand" and "bowling ball." It is very, very hard to get the grain of sand to a velocity that will affect the bowling ball much.
I think people tend to forget just how much of the Earth is solid (or molten) rock. The entire ecosphere -- from the depths of the ocean to the top of Everest -- is a very thin skin. An asteroid impact that can have a biological effect will still do very little to the planet in a geological or astronomical sense.
No. Genetic engineering != eugenics. They're two completely different ideas.
Because then it will be up to the author of the Web page to decide what constitutes "adult material," and if he guesses wrong, he goes to prison.
In some cases, it's obvious: porn site operators and the proprietors of sites like rotten.com would be idiots if they didn't use the tags. But there's a huge gray area. Is my personal home page "adult" because it contains a few four-letter words? I don't think so -- but some prosecutor, somewhere, might, and then I've got big problems. What about medical sites which, by their nature, include detailed discussions of human anatomy?
I wouldn't object at all to the creation of a standard (I'd rather have it done by the W3C or some other private entity than the government, but whatever) for "opt-in" kid-safe sites: a clearly published set of rules that says, "If your site does not contain any of the following [naked people / dirty words / etc.] then you are authorized to use this tag." Then the more extreme censorware could look for this tag.
I would still object to public libraries and the like being required to block stuff that doesn't contain the tag, for all kinds of reasons, but it would be a start.
Heh.
Yeah, pure math is different. Of course, there's a simmering long-term debate on whether math is a science or something else -- a particularly rigorous branch of philosophy, perhaps. The fact that it is vital to almost all modern science is unquestionable, but the question of what math actually is is a vexed one.
The "Darwin == Evolution" meme is so thoroughly imprinted in most people's brains that many creationist types seem to use it as evidence that Darwin produced the idea ex nihilo, and what had been a God-fearing, Creation-believing world suddenly turned atheist, evolutionist, and immoral as a result, leading over the next couple of centuries to world wars, eugenics, the Holocaust, and Bill Clinton. In fact, evolution was a theory that itself evolved, and continues to do so to this day; that's pretty much how scientific theories work. Darwin was an important step -- a major internal node in the phylogenetic tree, one might say -- but he wasn't the be-all and end-all, and has numerous "ancestors" and "descendants" in the history of the theory.
He did publish it in a book -- after several of the leading scientists of the day, with years of urging, persuaded him to do so. He was reluctant to do so both because he didn't want to be accused of stealing other people's ideas (kind of a Newton/Leibniz thing, only without the monstrous egos involved) and because he was well of the theological shitstorm he was going to unleash. In modern terms, his work was thoroughly peer-reviewed before On the Origin of Species came out.
Science is suppressed by ideological forces, governments and churches not least among them. What marks that crank is when he claims that this suppression is being done in secret. Real suppression -- from the Catholic church and Galileo to fundamentalist Protestantism and Darwin to Stalin and anyone whose science case doubt on Communist ideology -- tends to be very blatant.
Evolutionary biology is an observational science, not (in most cases, microbiology and some botany excepted) an experimental one. Do you consider the existence of other stars besides the Sun to be "anecdotal evidence" because no one can create a star in a lab? And yet we have just as much observational evidence for evolution, and in fact more laboratory evidence.
Darwin was not proposing a new law of nature; the idea of evolution had been around for decades. What he did was to take the hypothesizing of others in the field (e.g. Lamarck) and give it rigorous theoretical underpinnings, much as Einstein took the results of Maxwell's equations to their logical conclusion and explained contradictions in Newtonian mechanics that had bothered generations of physicists before him.
The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.
Well, yeah, and although he doesn't mention it, "Intelligent Design" fails pretty much every one of his tests. The Biblical-literalist/"Young Earth" creationists at least don't pretend to be scientific -- their beliefs boil down to "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" -- which makes them less dangerous to our educational system. But the ID crowd have done a really good job of getting courts and legislatures to listen to their psuedoscientific babble.
BTW, I've administered pretty much all the systems I listed above, so I do have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about.
Of course, you're an anonymous troll, so I doubt anything I say will have much of an influence on you, but your post represents a common enough bait-and-switch that I thought it should be addressed.
Yep. It's like someone bitching about Windows and saying, "Any time something goes seriously wrong, you have to drop back into DOS to fix it."
...
And the truth is, of course, that Macs have always been more reliable than Windows boxes -- back when the complaints about Macs the original poster was making were true, Windows machines suffered from constant "DLL hell" and BSOD on a daily, if not hourly basis. System 7 was far more reliable than Win 3.1, and OS X still beats the hell out of XP. Plus ca change
I lived in North Dakota for five years courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I have a lot of friends from there (who were actually born there, I mean, rather than being sent there to defend America's borders against ... I dunno, the Canadians, I guess.) Of course, we all live in Denver now, so make of that what you will. ;)
In any case, ND is reasonably wired. In Minot, which is kind of the archetype of Small Town USA, we got a commercial ISP in 1994, which was about the same time they were springing up all over the place. A couple of years later, there were several local ISP's there, with reasonable competition and good prices. These days, broadband is available for about the same price as everywhere else.
A lot of rural people are really happy to have the Internet. The isolation of a place like that -- especially during the Godawful winter -- can be difficult to imagine if you haven't experienced it. Being able to get online can make it a lot more tolerable. In general, largely for this reason, I think rural America got wired a lot faster than many people imagine.
I don't see a single post defending this obviously frivolous patent, or Apple for filing it. I do, however, see your post assuming that people will defend it.
Methinks this says more about you than about the Slashdot population in general.
Actually, God created government so that government could create the Net. Spam was an unintended consequence -- kinda like when God said, "Let there be beer," I'm sure He wasn't thinking of Budweiser.
Ever heard of a little dust-up called World War One, dumbass?
It's a joke -- a parody of the cut'n'paste "BSD is dying" trolls that used to pop up in every story that had anything to do with BSD, and many that didn't. You got caught up in a piece of relatively ancient /. history.
Something similar, on a larger scale, happens to the military fairly often. Somebody comes up with a whiz-bang idea for a new weapons system (which may or may not actually do the job) and the DoD says, "Ehhhh, no, we don't really need that, we'd rather spend the money on M16 ammunition for training [or something else equally unsexy]" -- but it turns out that the main contractor for the weapons system is in some influential Senator's home state, and whaddya know, the military is stuck with another white elephant. The utterly worthless Patriot missile system (which may actually have killed more US troops than it ever saved) is an example of this, IIRC.
Um. Looking at the "Prize Biographies" section of the site, I count among the winners five Christians and one practitioner of what seems to be a monotheistic branch of Hindu mysticism. The language on most of the site seems distinctly monotheistic, if not explicitly Christian. Frankly I'd be very surprised if most of the awards didn't go to Christians, since the majority of the judges are Christians themselves.
It's a moot point, anyway; Christianity is no more or less silly than any other religion. And "progress in Spiritual Realities" vs. "progress in religion" is a distinction without a difference.
The reason the Templeton Prize hasn't engendered any major controversy is because religion is off-limits to criticism in mainstream culture and media. Whenever anyone invokes religion (as long as it's a large, popular religion that's being invoked) we're supposed to bow our heads and talk respectfully about "spiritual authority" and "moral leadership" and the like. Science, OTOH, is fair game.
"Aspirin" is a special case. IIRC, it used to be an acknowledged trademark in the US -- but that trademark was owned by Bayer, which was a German company. When the US entered WW1, in the wave of anti-German sentiment of the time, the US government decided to revoke the trademark protection Bayer (and other German companies? Dunno ...) had enjoyed. So "Aspirin" became a public-domain word in the US. It may still be trademarked in other countries.
Kleenex, Post-It, and Wite-Out (sic) are still trademarked.
I think that's a huge mistake, honestly. I used BBEdit Lite for a couple of years before I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay for BBEdit. It taught me how to use BBEdit generally (it's a very intuitive program overall, but it does have its quirks) and, more importantly, convinced me that a text editor might be worth paying for -- "If the free version does all this, how much more cool stuff will I get if I pay for it?" TextWrangler may be cheaper, but not enough cheaper to create a bunch of "casual" users who will eventually pay for the full version, which was what BBEdit Lite did.
Um ... you're kidding, right?
Citibank has no interest in "the best interest of its customers." Like any other megacorp, they don't give a shit about you. They're much more concerned about the embarrassment of admitting that their security is worthless than they are about actually keeping people's money safe. The only way to get them to fix this problem is to publicize it as loudly as possible, because then not fixing the problem becomes even more of an embarrassment for them.
Who the hell knows?
... except in the sense that knowledge is always useful; the ability to gather and pass on knowledge is, as far as we know, one of our defining characteristics as a species.
... well, I can't help you.
Some knowledge is immediately, obviously useful. Some isn't useful at the time it's acquired, but turns out to be immensely useful later on. Some is never useful
People want to know if there is or was life on Mars because that would be an amazingly cool piece of knowledge. If you don't understand that