Slashdot, ScuttleMonkey, and Science Daily all really dropped the ball.
The research has not "demonstrated that evolution is a deterministic process, rather than a random selection as some competing theories suggested." What the research has demonstrated is that evolution not only selects DNA for mutations which express themselves as functional advantages within an individual organism, but also for mutations which influence the likelihood of other specific mutations.
All ball-droppers, be very asahmed of yourselves for not being more sensitive to such a controversial subject.
It's amazing to me that we're now beginning to see the practical limits of the Frankenstein monster known as The Web. The Web was supposed to make information flow more freely. Yet due to its poor design, only tech-savvy users are capable of doing things like transfer their contacts from one service to another without there being some kind of automated behind-the-scenes linkage between the services. The fact is that Web clients (mostly browsers) have access to both the ability to pull your contact list data from a service, and the ability to push new contact data to another service. In theory then, shouldn't the platform be capable of allowing any developer to write a client-side web app that is easy for a novice to run and ensure his data security that would perform the transaction for him, and even reconcile discrepencies between contact list specification formats? Why is something as notionally simple as contact list transfer so technologically complicated that we actually consider it to be a great service to us when two giants like Microsoft and Facebook bless us with the ability to synchronize our contact information between them?
The web needs rethought if we really want to use it as a vehicle for efficient and unimpeded information transaction.
The support for it was a little buggy (HTTP cookies used for login identification don't traverse domain names) but Blogger has supported at least two methods for using your own domain name: 1) "FTP publishing" and 2) Pointing a domain name at Blogger. Obviously if you want to use your own host and not just your own domain name then you were limited to option "FTP publishing," however for many web hosting plans that meant giving your plaintext login credentials to a third party. Yikes.
Personally I use Blogger simply for its publishing front-end and somewhat-spam-guarded blog comment subsystem. I "publish" via an RSS pull method, because neither methods #1 nor #2 gave me the power I wanted.
I'm glad some people are being honest and asking questions. Kudos to RAMMS+EIN.
Claiming that privacy's significance is fundamentally rooted in philosophical axioms specifically about privacy are all fine and well, but for those of us who live for more important things in life, something a bit more substantial is required.
IMHO, the significance of privacy breaks down into four issues, all derived from axiomatic benevolence (a very popular axiom):
1) Societal taboos: Society is irrational. Most people are not bright thinkers, and have a great deal of difficulty with the abstract logic required to view all aspects of life from an objective point of view (no, objective POV does not mean mean or median point of view; FOX news is not "fair and balanced.") If we lived in a society which had a strong rational majority, this point would be rendered pretty irrelevant. Take the relatively recent acceptance of homosexuality by society: if society were largely rational, then pre-existing societal taboos would not be a compelling reason to protect people's privacy. However, since social revolutions don't occur over night, the only way to let such people live in peace is to give them a degree of privacy within which to live. If we took away their privacy now, many people might simply choose to wholly deny their secret inclinations, and no social revolution would ever occur.
2) Omniscience versus state secrets: Are the majority of surveillance advocates actually suggesting we divulge all state secrets? Personally, I'm in favor of an entirely transparent government. However if this is not part of the no-privacy-deal, get ready for a kick in the nuts: The power to erase privacy is an awesomely frightening power that makes conspiracy theories start to look like real possibilities. If you're used to summarily disregarding conspiracy theorists as raving madmen, and you don't think privacy is important, get ready to change your tune. Once the kind of concentrated surveillance power the Bush administration dreams of actually exists, there ceases to be a practical limit domestic black ops. The most convoluted of conspiracy theories will no longer be relegated to novels, it will really be able to happen. (I'm not accusing the government of doing anything like this, but the government isn't a single person. Resist the inclination to personify organizations; they aren't that simple. A single rogue government agent with sufficient power would be all that's needed.)
3) Revolution: Strongly related to the first two points is something that has already been demonstrated (and demonstrated against) in our own country. Giving the government or the public access to everything you read is not completely unlike giving them access to everything you think. There are people in our country, including many of middle-eastern descent, who have a real, credible fear of purchasing certain books with a credit card, or checking them out at a library. Profiling, no matter how distasteful, is real, and its role in law enforcement is not going to go away. Beside that, there is the issue of trial in the court of public opinion: People should not have to face ridicule or discriminatory treatment for entertaining or studying currently-unfavorable ideas. Our culture would be locked into the status quo, with no opportunity for radical improvement.
4) Law enforcement: Although this point is largely predicated upon the potential for a fully pervasive surveillance system, it's still an important consideration. A public policy dismantling any notions of personal privacy does not automatically compel individuals to actually comply to the point of volunteering the most private details of their lives. Every person with a vibrator or porno collection to hide would be highly suspect in a community where everyone let the cops rummage through their homes on a whim. This is the same reason I use encryption to communicate with friends and colleagues, and the same reason that I don't allo
That is, if my post were as comprehensive as some of the figures in this story are.
Most web browser are massively memory-hungry. Circular Javascript references have Internet Explorer practically hemorrhaging unreachable allocations, and on Firefox, numbers are often reference-counted and allocated on the heap.
My CPU doesn't break above 20% when browsing the web either. But I'd be getting the same performance I would with four times as much RAM and a CPU that is one fifth as fast.
Don't discount network bottlenecks either. As Verizon rolls out its FiOS service in more areas, and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, even without paging virtual memory in and out of your hard disk, you should expect to see greater CPU usage.
Matusow continued, "To do this, Novell and Microsoft are providing covenants to each other's customers, therefore releasing each company from the other's patent portfolio. This may sounds odd vs. a traditional patent cross-license agreement but it is one of the things that makes this deal so unique."
That "special hell" you mentioned must be the "industry leader" position. In Pittsburgh, Verizon has been engaged in practically illegal (and totally illegal, if you can prove these maneuvers were planned and not lucky coincidence) activities along with its sister company Verizon DSL for a decade.
In fact for the past several years, Verizon has been charging all other CLECs (read: competitors to Verizon DSL) for last-mile piggybacking (which they are required by law to offer) even more money than it costs a customer to get Verizon DSL, and of course the only way Verizon DSL can provide such cheap service is by being the singular DSL company in Pittsburgh who is eligible for the cheapest pricing bracket for last-mile piggyback rates.
For example, while Verizon DSL charges $14.99/month for their basic DSL package, Verizon charges some of its competitors $16/month for each DSL customer they have.
This is of course all legal unless you can prove that Verizon and Verizon DSL have consorted for this to be the case. And it is arguably illegal, still, if you can prove that Verizon's piggybacking rates are anti-competitive. But no one seems to be doing anything about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot, ScuttleMonkey, and Science Daily all really dropped the ball.
The research has not "demonstrated that evolution is a deterministic process, rather than a random selection as some competing theories suggested." What the research has demonstrated is that evolution not only selects DNA for mutations which express themselves as functional advantages within an individual organism, but also for mutations which influence the likelihood of other specific mutations.
All ball-droppers, be very asahmed of yourselves for not being more sensitive to such a controversial subject.
You should all thank Kebes for his post.
It's amazing to me that we're now beginning to see the practical limits of the Frankenstein monster known as The Web. The Web was supposed to make information flow more freely. Yet due to its poor design, only tech-savvy users are capable of doing things like transfer their contacts from one service to another without there being some kind of automated behind-the-scenes linkage between the services. The fact is that Web clients (mostly browsers) have access to both the ability to pull your contact list data from a service, and the ability to push new contact data to another service. In theory then, shouldn't the platform be capable of allowing any developer to write a client-side web app that is easy for a novice to run and ensure his data security that would perform the transaction for him, and even reconcile discrepencies between contact list specification formats? Why is something as notionally simple as contact list transfer so technologically complicated that we actually consider it to be a great service to us when two giants like Microsoft and Facebook bless us with the ability to synchronize our contact information between them?
The web needs rethought if we really want to use it as a vehicle for efficient and unimpeded information transaction.
The support for it was a little buggy (HTTP cookies used for login identification don't traverse domain names) but Blogger has supported at least two methods for using your own domain name: 1) "FTP publishing" and 2) Pointing a domain name at Blogger. Obviously if you want to use your own host and not just your own domain name then you were limited to option "FTP publishing," however for many web hosting plans that meant giving your plaintext login credentials to a third party. Yikes.
Personally I use Blogger simply for its publishing front-end and somewhat-spam-guarded blog comment subsystem. I "publish" via an RSS pull method, because neither methods #1 nor #2 gave me the power I wanted.
This guy's post is NOT off-topic.
Get your heads in the game, mods!
I'm glad some people are being honest and asking questions. Kudos to RAMMS+EIN.
Claiming that privacy's significance is fundamentally rooted in philosophical axioms specifically about privacy are all fine and well, but for those of us who live for more important things in life, something a bit more substantial is required.
IMHO, the significance of privacy breaks down into four issues, all derived from axiomatic benevolence (a very popular axiom):
1) Societal taboos: Society is irrational. Most people are not bright thinkers, and have a great deal of difficulty with the abstract logic required to view all aspects of life from an objective point of view (no, objective POV does not mean mean or median point of view; FOX news is not "fair and balanced.") If we lived in a society which had a strong rational majority, this point would be rendered pretty irrelevant. Take the relatively recent acceptance of homosexuality by society: if society were largely rational, then pre-existing societal taboos would not be a compelling reason to protect people's privacy. However, since social revolutions don't occur over night, the only way to let such people live in peace is to give them a degree of privacy within which to live. If we took away their privacy now, many people might simply choose to wholly deny their secret inclinations, and no social revolution would ever occur.
2) Omniscience versus state secrets: Are the majority of surveillance advocates actually suggesting we divulge all state secrets? Personally, I'm in favor of an entirely transparent government. However if this is not part of the no-privacy-deal, get ready for a kick in the nuts: The power to erase privacy is an awesomely frightening power that makes conspiracy theories start to look like real possibilities. If you're used to summarily disregarding conspiracy theorists as raving madmen, and you don't think privacy is important, get ready to change your tune. Once the kind of concentrated surveillance power the Bush administration dreams of actually exists, there ceases to be a practical limit domestic black ops. The most convoluted of conspiracy theories will no longer be relegated to novels, it will really be able to happen. (I'm not accusing the government of doing anything like this, but the government isn't a single person. Resist the inclination to personify organizations; they aren't that simple. A single rogue government agent with sufficient power would be all that's needed.)
3) Revolution: Strongly related to the first two points is something that has already been demonstrated (and demonstrated against) in our own country. Giving the government or the public access to everything you read is not completely unlike giving them access to everything you think. There are people in our country, including many of middle-eastern descent, who have a real, credible fear of purchasing certain books with a credit card, or checking them out at a library. Profiling, no matter how distasteful, is real, and its role in law enforcement is not going to go away. Beside that, there is the issue of trial in the court of public opinion: People should not have to face ridicule or discriminatory treatment for entertaining or studying currently-unfavorable ideas. Our culture would be locked into the status quo, with no opportunity for radical improvement.
4) Law enforcement: Although this point is largely predicated upon the potential for a fully pervasive surveillance system, it's still an important consideration. A public policy dismantling any notions of personal privacy does not automatically compel individuals to actually comply to the point of volunteering the most private details of their lives. Every person with a vibrator or porno collection to hide would be highly suspect in a community where everyone let the cops rummage through their homes on a whim. This is the same reason I use encryption to communicate with friends and colleagues, and the same reason that I don't allo
Don't forget password-protection!
Subject says it all.
That is, if my post were as comprehensive as some of the figures in this story are.
Most web browser are massively memory-hungry. Circular Javascript references have Internet Explorer practically hemorrhaging unreachable allocations, and on Firefox, numbers are often reference-counted and allocated on the heap.
My CPU doesn't break above 20% when browsing the web either. But I'd be getting the same performance I would with four times as much RAM and a CPU that is one fifth as fast.
Don't discount network bottlenecks either. As Verizon rolls out its FiOS service in more areas, and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, even without paging virtual memory in and out of your hard disk, you should expect to see greater CPU usage.
Matusow continued, "To do this, Novell and Microsoft are providing covenants to each other's customers, therefore releasing each company from the other's patent portfolio. This may sounds odd vs. a traditional patent cross-license agreement but it is one of the things that makes this deal so unique."
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2927608517.html
That "special hell" you mentioned must be the "industry leader" position. In Pittsburgh, Verizon has been engaged in practically illegal (and totally illegal, if you can prove these maneuvers were planned and not lucky coincidence) activities along with its sister company Verizon DSL for a decade.
In fact for the past several years, Verizon has been charging all other CLECs (read: competitors to Verizon DSL) for last-mile piggybacking (which they are required by law to offer) even more money than it costs a customer to get Verizon DSL, and of course the only way Verizon DSL can provide such cheap service is by being the singular DSL company in Pittsburgh who is eligible for the cheapest pricing bracket for last-mile piggyback rates.
For example, while Verizon DSL charges $14.99/month for their basic DSL package, Verizon charges some of its competitors $16/month for each DSL customer they have.
This is of course all legal unless you can prove that Verizon and Verizon DSL have consorted for this to be the case. And it is arguably illegal, still, if you can prove that Verizon's piggybacking rates are anti-competitive. But no one seems to be doing anything about this.