I realize that we face a pretty tough battle with certain "superbugs", but wouldn't one expect that as these bacteria adapt immunity to current antibiotics that they'll open up a weakness to something else? I suppose it's _possible_ that they're evolving to be stronger in a general sense, but usually I think of evolution as becoming more fit for one's environment -- which usually makes one less fit for another environment. Engineering is all about tradeoffs -- whether via intelligent design (our designs) or evolution (natures "design"). We created a new environment for them by introducing antibiotics, which they've adapted to. So we'll change the environment again.
I understand this is not simple or straightforward, but I think the idea of "superbugs" is a bit of misnomer -- they're only super until we find the next weakness, and I imagine they'll always be one, even if it takes us a while to find it.
I'd agree that the loss of tactile feedback is not a good thing. But engineering isn't about doing only good things: it's about making tradeoffs. The tradeoff here is that you lose tactile feedback and you gain the flexibility of "soft buttons" (i.e. a malleable interface) and you gain screen real estate when the buttons are not in use. So the question isn't about whether it's "better" or "worse", but whether the tradeoff was worth it. And the answer depends on your usage and the way you value of each feature.
For me, I think I prefer the flexibility and extra screen space (without extra device size) to be worth the tradeoff. If you don't feel that way, I guess you're a good customer for one of the other options.
If there was some way to bring back the tactile feedback without losing either of the gains I mentioned, I'd be all for it. But short of some morphing glass that can develop ridges and become clicky, I doubt we'll see it:/
Einstein did state "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.". Look it up. I understand that one could argue for spirituality or agnosticism, and that's fine. I suppose I could have avoided the distraction by just saying: I don't really care that much what Einstein believed because he was not in any manner an "exploiter of people's scientific ignorance", which was the original poster's complaint and the strange connection you were trying to draw.
Most science was originally done as a means to understand the mind of God. So I fully appreciate that religious people can be great scientists. This whole chain of comments rather, was related to people who prey on people's belief in God to undermine belief in science, when the two don't have to be in conflict unless you take a ridiculously literal reading of the Bible.
(No really! Precisely 500,000 Isrealites were killed in the battle between Abijah and Jeroboam... not a one more or less! Wars were always conducted in round numbers back then. The Bible would never include even the smallest inaccuracy!)
In any case, if I'm understanding your sentiment, I agree: just because someone believes in God they are not automatically unscientific or to be discredited. However, there was the implication in your post that because there are theist scientists, we should not be wary of the crop of theists who are anti-science. I don't think that's true at all. If that wasn't the implication of your post... then I have no idea what you were getting at by appealing to Einstein's beliefs.
As to biases: I'd agree that most "professional atheists" are defensive and self-righteous. I try not to be, but I'm sure it leaks out sometimes;) But just to be clear: my bias was not intended as a general insult as there are many religious people whom I love and respect, my point was very specifically about gullibility on non-religious matters. Everyone has their flaws, but in my personal experience gullibility seems correlated with religious tendencies. One might cast it differently by saying that atheists are overly skeptical... in fact that almost lines up with your claim that they're defensive and righteous. Maybe our experiences aren't that different after all:)
It's a little odd to accuse me of nitpicking with anecdotal evidence when you are making such absolute generalizations. If you said "most people prefer their own race", then my claim that I didn't would have been meaningless as a single anecdotal data point. However, if you say "everyone prefers their own race" then a single data point is all that is needed to disprove your thesis. And that's what I provided. It's not anecdotal evidence in the usual sense.
Then there's the fact that your claim provided no evidence whatsoever, making it not only anecdotal, but simply wild speculation since it was making claims about the entire human population.
Call it nitpicky all you want: you made a ridiculous absolute claim and people gave you counter evidence. No big deal, but you might want to update your perceptions about mankind.
I am wondering what evidence you have that "everyone has the inherent instinct"? Is there any chance that people truly vary on a more fundamental level? Or does it all have to be some social conditioning that "overrides" the instinct? It is sort of astounding to me the negatively loaded examples you gave and the use of the term "brainwashing" to refer to what seem natural preferences to me. I don't really care much about race, so I don't care about preserving my race. Never have. I care about preserving smart, warm, curious, and creative people. That is my natural instinct and it doesn't run along racial lines in my experience.
Do you think that homosexuals are "brainwashed" to like the same sex? Or is it possible that they have different natural desires? Looking at the physical variations throughout the human race, can we hypothesize that there are mental and instinctual variation as well? It seems very likely. Whenever I hear someone way "everyone is..." I question how deeply they've considered the issue in question.
Absolutely false. You are certainly correct that the majority of people prefer members of their own race, but there are distinct exceptions. I know, because I am one. I don't dislike my race at all, but for whatever reason, most of my friends are not of my race. I was just discussing this tendancy the other day with a (non-white) friend and pointing out that while I look like an average white guy, I've always felt like an outsider because of certain personality traits. Thus I relate most closely with people who feel like outsiders. It seems that non-whites in America are more likely to feel like outsiders than whites are, thus the composition of my circle of friends.
Yes: it's still the same case of me wanting to be with "people like me" -- no argument there. It's just that race does not seem a strong influence on whether I feel someone is "like me" or not. Personality traits trump appearance for me, and I imagine, many others.
Note that even in the study, dark skinned avatars did worse than light skinned avatars, but that only speaks to averages. On specific cases there were many who treated them equally. Some people are not influenced by race the way you think.
I don't question that many great scientists were theists and/or crackpots; I was referring to a specific piece of misinformation that has been spread despite its debunking for decades now. Another common one is the misinformation that Darwin converted on his deathbed.
I've observed that misinformation seems to spread like wildfire through religious people more so than non-religious circles. And I'm not speaking out of distaste or outsider ignorance: I come from a family that is one half atheist and one half evangelical Christian. I was raised Christian and my grandfather, who I respect very much, was pastor of our church.
Nonetheless, I seem to see a correlation between tendency towards strong religious beliefs and gullibility towards one's bias. Yes: gullibility towards one's bias can be found in all groups, but it seems more common with strongly religious folks than others.
That was my point. Maybe it was a bit of a non-sequitur, but I don't see where I misspoke or where there is a catch-22.
Other people have completely debunked the claim about Einstein's religion. In his own words, he was an atheist. So now I have a question for you: Why do you continue to trust the sources that so proudly spout obvious misinformation?
One thing that has become exceedingly apparent to me over the past several years is that Christians forward around more misinformed email chains than any other group. I've got family and friends all over the religious spectrum, and it's always the most religious ones who need continuous correction with snopes and other informational sources.
To me, that's the most damning evidence against religion I've come across: it's adherents are demonstrably quick to swallow a lie, easy to manipulate, and unlikely to verify things for themselves, even when it has nothing to do with religion.
Thanks very much for your well thought out reply. I even read the non-bold bits:)
You make a good case for having a spec and more than one implementation -- as opposed to the implementation being the spec, which is kind of what happens with singular systems whether intended or not. I'm still not sure we benefit from having more than two, though. I think we'd get most of the benefits you describe with just two independent implementations. I'd personally pick WebKit and Gecko.
But it's a free world, and of course I support anyone who decides to write an HTML renderer for their education and enjoyment. Unless truly superior it would probably never gain enough traction to be worth testing on. But something bugs me when a company with huge pull decides to write an also-ran renderer that doesn't have any significant benefits over what is available, yet is assured to be popular enough and unique enough to require testing. It seems to be just vanity and pride, and it creates needless work for others. I'd almost call it irresponsible. This was my criticism of IE8 and my praise of Safari and Chrome (i.e. the decision in both cases to use the existing KHTML).
Of course there's more important issues in the world to worry about -- time to move on:)
I admittedly don't know Flash that well, so I'll take your word on it's shortcomings. That said: as a user I always get a decent consistent experience and I imagine that developers, though limited, don't have to run through testing their app completely for four different platforms just to feel comfortable with a release.
I should specify that when I complain about rendering engines, I'm usually not talking about appearance but about functionality. I admit CSS is pretty good across WebKit, Gecko, and even IE7. (IE6 is a mess). But functionality -- DHTML type stuff, manipulating the DOM or CSS from Javascript, is still pretty different across all of them.
But here's my main point: I challenge you to explain why "the more the merrier". As a user and as a developer, I don't see how more than one or two rendering engines benefits us. In fact I am fairly sure it hurts both users and developers. It is a notion of "competition is always good" from markets where detailed compatibility is not required and I don't think it applies to rendering engines.
Users can benefit from many browser options, sure: like UI features and such. But at this point the rendering engine should be like a sorting library: the algorithms are figured out and there's no point in having multiple implementations of the same thing. In fact it's bad because you would never know which library you were linking to on the user's machine it introduces bugs. I've yet to hear a compelling argument for "the more the merrier" with rendering engines.
Oh, I know the differences quite well. I just don't know if the going from the complete mess of IE6 to the almost reasonable IE7 should be considered wondrous progress. The fact that you give that as an example makes me feel bad for how beaten down us web designers have become. We thank them for giving us a mediocre product as long as it's better than the steaming pile of crap they gave us last time.
Here's the deal: a rendering engine is complex, but it is not magical rocket science. And like a sorting library, we developers don't benefit from having multiple implementations of the exact same algorithms. It's just ways to get inconsistent behavior with no practical benefit. The idea that competition in this arena benefitted us is, I think, a misapplication of the general idea of competition being "good". It is, but not when complex interoperability is concerned.
Well, when I say has-been I mean last year. I found significant behavioral differences (not necessarily appearance differences) between WebKit, Gecko, IE6, and IE7, all of which have significant market share. Depends on how much interactive stuff is on the page and how accessible you want it to be, but I had to test in four browsers.
The work to get things behaving the same in each browser using hacks (and testing that you didn't break the other browsers in the process) took more than the original development time in WebKit. Admittedly, if I only had to do WebKit and Gecko, it wouldn't have been too bad. But when I heard MS was coming out with IE8 instead of using an existing rendering engine I wanted to cry: you know that IE6, 7, and 8 are all going to require individual testing and they'll all be around for years to come.
As a has-been web developer and regular web user, I'm going to suggest that the advantages of having many browsers (or more specifically, rendering engines) is largely overstated.
I don't see that browsers have made any wondrous leaps of progress due to competition. In fact it seems that competition has stymied progress at times, as browsers had to attempt supporting incompatible features that grew out of attempts to one-up the competition. Companies that develop websites have to waste a lot of resources on testing, which would benefit the user more if spent on UI or other types of development. Either that or they _don't_ spend the resources on testing so customers are variously frustrated as no one browser handles all sites correctly.
Flash is an example of something that seemingly progressed well, perhaps faster than browsers, while having essentially no competition.
So yeah, I understand that in some cases competition is a benefit, but not always. I think interoperability needs can sometimes trump the advantages of competition. I'm not sure I believe competition benefitted browsers or the web.
Of course I've been saying for a while that MS should pick up either Gecko or WebKit and not create another rendering platform. But nobody seems to agree with me except for Google:)
It's just short sighted to claim that it can't possibly compete outside a lab when anything could happen.
I hear where you're coming from, but my feeling (and I'm not a biologist either) is that with the continuous struggle of life on this huge planet the idea that any one new organism is going to wreak havoc on everything is unlikely. New stuff is jumping into the fray all the time, and so far we've survived it all -- not necessarily individually, but as a species. Same for other species. It seems creatures are, and the environment is, more resilient than that.
The answers we should be looking for is how to minimize them
Agreed. I also get tired of people who think it's an all or nothing proposition, pointing out that my efforts in one area are negated by my failings in another. The fact is that every bit helps. In the end we don't need to have zero impact, we just need to have less impact than the environment can sustainably handle. The environment is an ongoing process that can buffer some degree of our behavior. We just have to determine where that limit is and stay below it. With a combination of more efficient behaviors, technologies, energy sources, we can almost surely lead highly comfortable lives without screwing anything up.
It's not easy to know where the limits are, or which technologies will pan out the best, but working on it is a heck of a lot better than the extremes of "live in a hut and eat grass" vs. "exploit the world without concern".
The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.
Yes, a bunch of whiners with a hell of a lot of power and no hesitation in using it against anyone in their way. What do you think they've lost exactly? The moral high ground? General respect? The problem is they don't care. They've got fear on their side and no conscience to slow them down. As far as I can tell, they're winning.
In all fairness, I'm sure there's plenty of Republicans who would be disgusted by this article too. But I know the group you're talking about: they dominate not only the Republican party, but also the US. They have no concept of what the American Ideal is, thinking and acting with all the compassion and subtlety of leaders of a third world nation. Yet they are more comfortable telling others to love the US or leave it. Meanwhile, we take on the guilt and shame that they don't feel, and we want to leave -- even though in reality this is _our_ country: it belongs to the people who believe in the constitution and the bill of rights.
Bah. Rambling. Frustrated. What can actually be done? Anything?
It is true that if teachers were armed then rampage style killings would be brought to a close much more quickly. I also agree that guns will always be with us and we have to deal with that. However I take exception to the common claim that if more people were armed that violence would go down in all cases. The problem with this claim is that you can find instances where it is simply not true.
Yes: in smaller communities where most people assume they will live long and well, and are not terribly angry, arming the populace is probably a fine idea.
However there are more than enough examples of messed up areas where violence gets worse as the number of guns goes up. Witness any poverty stricken gangland areas of the US for plenty of data. If there are enough people in an environment who are angry at the environment and aren't sure they'll live long anyways, then arming the populous just makes things worse.
In the end, guns are not themselves good or ill. They just take on the tone of the environment. I support gun rights in general, but I accept that in some places, for practical reasons, guns must be controlled.
As to the specifics, I guess we'll hash that out when people stop taking simplified, polarized views of it.
Can someone with mod points please mod up some of the excellent responses to Solandri's post? This has nothing to do with statistical margin of error when the company is proposing to test 100% of the beef. I feel his post is misguided in many ways, but rather than mod it down, modding up the thoughtful replies would be a lot more productive. I won't bother rehashing them myself.
Some three billion people in poverty in the world, each with a mind more powerful than any computer (as proven by this task), looking to make a miniscule amount of money for themselves and their families. And this is the best the market can come up with? Sheesh.
I don't know anything about anything (I didn't even go to college, ha!), but I am curious why a higher education system would be considered superior because "everyone has a chance to get into them"? I guess it would depend on why they're being kept out -- if smart, ambitious people are being kept out for financial reasons, that is a flaw. On the other hand, I get the sense that here in the US we ship everyone to college whether they have any interest or aptitude to learn anything, and we churn out tons of college grads who are of very low quality.
That's not to say we don't also have tons of college grads of very high quality. But it's not just about the number of people who get pushed through, is it? Perhaps that's not at all what you were implying, but I am curious.
I never saw them drink it warm in the UK, but they don't drink it ice cold either, which is what is common in the US. In the US there is generally no such thing as serving a beer too cold. My buddy keeps mugs in the freezer and his fridge on 35F so it forms some ice crystals when he pours it. In the UK they seem to serve it chilled to a specific temperature, say 55F. Kind of like a wine aficionado might do. It's definitely chilled but I can see plenty of yanks calling it "warm".
The virus just needs to make sure it doesn't kill the host before it can spread to another. Or that it doesn't kill all possible hosts. HIV has been good about following those rules.
I don't think that applies to the issue at hand, though. This kind of parasite can really "spread", so it's important it doesn't kill the host at all.
C'mon: have you ever been part of a huge project? And you made no mistakes in the process?
If you haven't been part of a huge project, then I can understand why you are surprised mistakes get made. But in the world I've seen mistakes happen all the time no matter what the size of the project. In fact, larger projects tend to have more mistakes (though if run well, perhaps fewer as a percentage of total tasks).
This is a big mistake, it sucks for WB, and someone might lose their job. But if there's no surprises in a $150mm project, you haven't looked closely enough.
I think anyone who has taken the time to really get to know a pet parrot could tell you they seem to be about as smart as a dog or cat. Which is astonishing given their far smaller brain size. I had a couple cockatiels, who must have had brains like raisins, yet they exhibited fairly impressive learning abilities. Beyond just imitation of word sounds, they could connect those sounds to situations; I trained them to say "I'm hungry" whenever I brought them food. A more interesting one was the phrase "good bird", which I had used as generic praise, but which the male cockatiel spontaneously applied during and immediately following coitus with his mate.
Another one that impressed me was learning to walk on a glass table: at first they were afraid to step off of a plate placed on the table, looking with suspicion at the transparent surface. Eventually, with some crumbs on it, they were willing to carefully try walking on the crumb-sprinkled parts. Eventually they ventured out onto the clean parts as well, and within a few meals they had become totally comfortable walking on the glass.
In any case, it doesn't totally shock me that some birds test as self aware. I think there must be a different model for intelligence in birds. Much like other areas, birds seem to have adapted a weight-efficient means of carrying around what they need.
Well there's preview and then there's actually testing the links. Never have I had so much trouble with a post. This particular consciousness is now thoroughly embarassed:) Thanks for the fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that we face a pretty tough battle with certain "superbugs", but wouldn't one expect that as these bacteria adapt immunity to current antibiotics that they'll open up a weakness to something else? I suppose it's _possible_ that they're evolving to be stronger in a general sense, but usually I think of evolution as becoming more fit for one's environment -- which usually makes one less fit for another environment. Engineering is all about tradeoffs -- whether via intelligent design (our designs) or evolution (natures "design"). We created a new environment for them by introducing antibiotics, which they've adapted to. So we'll change the environment again.
I understand this is not simple or straightforward, but I think the idea of "superbugs" is a bit of misnomer -- they're only super until we find the next weakness, and I imagine they'll always be one, even if it takes us a while to find it.
Cheers.
I'd agree that the loss of tactile feedback is not a good thing. But engineering isn't about doing only good things: it's about making tradeoffs. The tradeoff here is that you lose tactile feedback and you gain the flexibility of "soft buttons" (i.e. a malleable interface) and you gain screen real estate when the buttons are not in use. So the question isn't about whether it's "better" or "worse", but whether the tradeoff was worth it. And the answer depends on your usage and the way you value of each feature.
For me, I think I prefer the flexibility and extra screen space (without extra device size) to be worth the tradeoff. If you don't feel that way, I guess you're a good customer for one of the other options.
If there was some way to bring back the tactile feedback without losing either of the gains I mentioned, I'd be all for it. But short of some morphing glass that can develop ridges and become clicky, I doubt we'll see it :/
Cheers.
Einstein did state "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.". Look it up. I understand that one could argue for spirituality or agnosticism, and that's fine. I suppose I could have avoided the distraction by just saying: I don't really care that much what Einstein believed because he was not in any manner an "exploiter of people's scientific ignorance", which was the original poster's complaint and the strange connection you were trying to draw.
Most science was originally done as a means to understand the mind of God. So I fully appreciate that religious people can be great scientists. This whole chain of comments rather, was related to people who prey on people's belief in God to undermine belief in science, when the two don't have to be in conflict unless you take a ridiculously literal reading of the Bible.
(No really! Precisely 500,000 Isrealites were killed in the battle between Abijah and Jeroboam... not a one more or less! Wars were always conducted in round numbers back then. The Bible would never include even the smallest inaccuracy!)
In any case, if I'm understanding your sentiment, I agree: just because someone believes in God they are not automatically unscientific or to be discredited. However, there was the implication in your post that because there are theist scientists, we should not be wary of the crop of theists who are anti-science. I don't think that's true at all. If that wasn't the implication of your post... then I have no idea what you were getting at by appealing to Einstein's beliefs.
As to biases: I'd agree that most "professional atheists" are defensive and self-righteous. I try not to be, but I'm sure it leaks out sometimes ;) But just to be clear: my bias was not intended as a general insult as there are many religious people whom I love and respect, my point was very specifically about gullibility on non-religious matters. Everyone has their flaws, but in my personal experience gullibility seems correlated with religious tendencies. One might cast it differently by saying that atheists are overly skeptical... in fact that almost lines up with your claim that they're defensive and righteous. Maybe our experiences aren't that different after all :)
Cheers.
It's a little odd to accuse me of nitpicking with anecdotal evidence when you are making such absolute generalizations. If you said "most people prefer their own race", then my claim that I didn't would have been meaningless as a single anecdotal data point. However, if you say "everyone prefers their own race" then a single data point is all that is needed to disprove your thesis. And that's what I provided. It's not anecdotal evidence in the usual sense.
Then there's the fact that your claim provided no evidence whatsoever, making it not only anecdotal, but simply wild speculation since it was making claims about the entire human population.
Call it nitpicky all you want: you made a ridiculous absolute claim and people gave you counter evidence. No big deal, but you might want to update your perceptions about mankind.
Cheers.
I am wondering what evidence you have that "everyone has the inherent instinct"? Is there any chance that people truly vary on a more fundamental level? Or does it all have to be some social conditioning that "overrides" the instinct? It is sort of astounding to me the negatively loaded examples you gave and the use of the term "brainwashing" to refer to what seem natural preferences to me. I don't really care much about race, so I don't care about preserving my race. Never have. I care about preserving smart, warm, curious, and creative people. That is my natural instinct and it doesn't run along racial lines in my experience.
Do you think that homosexuals are "brainwashed" to like the same sex? Or is it possible that they have different natural desires? Looking at the physical variations throughout the human race, can we hypothesize that there are mental and instinctual variation as well? It seems very likely. Whenever I hear someone way "everyone is..." I question how deeply they've considered the issue in question.
Cheers.
everyone prefers others of their same race
Absolutely false. You are certainly correct that the majority of people prefer members of their own race, but there are distinct exceptions. I know, because I am one. I don't dislike my race at all, but for whatever reason, most of my friends are not of my race. I was just discussing this tendancy the other day with a (non-white) friend and pointing out that while I look like an average white guy, I've always felt like an outsider because of certain personality traits. Thus I relate most closely with people who feel like outsiders. It seems that non-whites in America are more likely to feel like outsiders than whites are, thus the composition of my circle of friends.
Yes: it's still the same case of me wanting to be with "people like me" -- no argument there. It's just that race does not seem a strong influence on whether I feel someone is "like me" or not. Personality traits trump appearance for me, and I imagine, many others.
Note that even in the study, dark skinned avatars did worse than light skinned avatars, but that only speaks to averages. On specific cases there were many who treated them equally. Some people are not influenced by race the way you think.
Cheers.
I don't question that many great scientists were theists and/or crackpots; I was referring to a specific piece of misinformation that has been spread despite its debunking for decades now. Another common one is the misinformation that Darwin converted on his deathbed.
I've observed that misinformation seems to spread like wildfire through religious people more so than non-religious circles. And I'm not speaking out of distaste or outsider ignorance: I come from a family that is one half atheist and one half evangelical Christian. I was raised Christian and my grandfather, who I respect very much, was pastor of our church.
Nonetheless, I seem to see a correlation between tendency towards strong religious beliefs and gullibility towards one's bias. Yes: gullibility towards one's bias can be found in all groups, but it seems more common with strongly religious folks than others.
That was my point. Maybe it was a bit of a non-sequitur, but I don't see where I misspoke or where there is a catch-22.
Cheers.
Other people have completely debunked the claim about Einstein's religion. In his own words, he was an atheist. So now I have a question for you: Why do you continue to trust the sources that so proudly spout obvious misinformation?
One thing that has become exceedingly apparent to me over the past several years is that Christians forward around more misinformed email chains than any other group. I've got family and friends all over the religious spectrum, and it's always the most religious ones who need continuous correction with snopes and other informational sources.
To me, that's the most damning evidence against religion I've come across: it's adherents are demonstrably quick to swallow a lie, easy to manipulate, and unlikely to verify things for themselves, even when it has nothing to do with religion.
Cheers
Thanks very much for your well thought out reply. I even read the non-bold bits :)
You make a good case for having a spec and more than one implementation -- as opposed to the implementation being the spec, which is kind of what happens with singular systems whether intended or not. I'm still not sure we benefit from having more than two, though. I think we'd get most of the benefits you describe with just two independent implementations. I'd personally pick WebKit and Gecko.
But it's a free world, and of course I support anyone who decides to write an HTML renderer for their education and enjoyment. Unless truly superior it would probably never gain enough traction to be worth testing on. But something bugs me when a company with huge pull decides to write an also-ran renderer that doesn't have any significant benefits over what is available, yet is assured to be popular enough and unique enough to require testing. It seems to be just vanity and pride, and it creates needless work for others. I'd almost call it irresponsible. This was my criticism of IE8 and my praise of Safari and Chrome (i.e. the decision in both cases to use the existing KHTML).
Of course there's more important issues in the world to worry about -- time to move on :)
Cheers
I admittedly don't know Flash that well, so I'll take your word on it's shortcomings. That said: as a user I always get a decent consistent experience and I imagine that developers, though limited, don't have to run through testing their app completely for four different platforms just to feel comfortable with a release.
I should specify that when I complain about rendering engines, I'm usually not talking about appearance but about functionality. I admit CSS is pretty good across WebKit, Gecko, and even IE7. (IE6 is a mess). But functionality -- DHTML type stuff, manipulating the DOM or CSS from Javascript, is still pretty different across all of them.
But here's my main point: I challenge you to explain why "the more the merrier". As a user and as a developer, I don't see how more than one or two rendering engines benefits us. In fact I am fairly sure it hurts both users and developers. It is a notion of "competition is always good" from markets where detailed compatibility is not required and I don't think it applies to rendering engines.
Users can benefit from many browser options, sure: like UI features and such. But at this point the rendering engine should be like a sorting library: the algorithms are figured out and there's no point in having multiple implementations of the same thing. In fact it's bad because you would never know which library you were linking to on the user's machine it introduces bugs. I've yet to hear a compelling argument for "the more the merrier" with rendering engines.
Cheers.
Oh, I know the differences quite well. I just don't know if the going from the complete mess of IE6 to the almost reasonable IE7 should be considered wondrous progress. The fact that you give that as an example makes me feel bad for how beaten down us web designers have become. We thank them for giving us a mediocre product as long as it's better than the steaming pile of crap they gave us last time.
Here's the deal: a rendering engine is complex, but it is not magical rocket science. And like a sorting library, we developers don't benefit from having multiple implementations of the exact same algorithms. It's just ways to get inconsistent behavior with no practical benefit. The idea that competition in this arena benefitted us is, I think, a misapplication of the general idea of competition being "good". It is, but not when complex interoperability is concerned.
Cheers.
Well, when I say has-been I mean last year. I found significant behavioral differences (not necessarily appearance differences) between WebKit, Gecko, IE6, and IE7, all of which have significant market share. Depends on how much interactive stuff is on the page and how accessible you want it to be, but I had to test in four browsers.
The work to get things behaving the same in each browser using hacks (and testing that you didn't break the other browsers in the process) took more than the original development time in WebKit. Admittedly, if I only had to do WebKit and Gecko, it wouldn't have been too bad. But when I heard MS was coming out with IE8 instead of using an existing rendering engine I wanted to cry: you know that IE6, 7, and 8 are all going to require individual testing and they'll all be around for years to come.
Cheers.
As a has-been web developer and regular web user, I'm going to suggest that the advantages of having many browsers (or more specifically, rendering engines) is largely overstated.
I don't see that browsers have made any wondrous leaps of progress due to competition. In fact it seems that competition has stymied progress at times, as browsers had to attempt supporting incompatible features that grew out of attempts to one-up the competition. Companies that develop websites have to waste a lot of resources on testing, which would benefit the user more if spent on UI or other types of development. Either that or they _don't_ spend the resources on testing so customers are variously frustrated as no one browser handles all sites correctly.
Flash is an example of something that seemingly progressed well, perhaps faster than browsers, while having essentially no competition.
So yeah, I understand that in some cases competition is a benefit, but not always. I think interoperability needs can sometimes trump the advantages of competition. I'm not sure I believe competition benefitted browsers or the web.
Of course I've been saying for a while that MS should pick up either Gecko or WebKit and not create another rendering platform. But nobody seems to agree with me except for Google :)
Cheers
It's just short sighted to claim that it can't possibly compete outside a lab when anything could happen.
I hear where you're coming from, but my feeling (and I'm not a biologist either) is that with the continuous struggle of life on this huge planet the idea that any one new organism is going to wreak havoc on everything is unlikely. New stuff is jumping into the fray all the time, and so far we've survived it all -- not necessarily individually, but as a species. Same for other species. It seems creatures are, and the environment is, more resilient than that.
Cheers
The answers we should be looking for is how to minimize them
Agreed. I also get tired of people who think it's an all or nothing proposition, pointing out that my efforts in one area are negated by my failings in another. The fact is that every bit helps. In the end we don't need to have zero impact, we just need to have less impact than the environment can sustainably handle. The environment is an ongoing process that can buffer some degree of our behavior. We just have to determine where that limit is and stay below it. With a combination of more efficient behaviors, technologies, energy sources, we can almost surely lead highly comfortable lives without screwing anything up.
It's not easy to know where the limits are, or which technologies will pan out the best, but working on it is a heck of a lot better than the extremes of "live in a hut and eat grass" vs. "exploit the world without concern".
The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.
Yes, a bunch of whiners with a hell of a lot of power and no hesitation in using it against anyone in their way. What do you think they've lost exactly? The moral high ground? General respect? The problem is they don't care. They've got fear on their side and no conscience to slow them down. As far as I can tell, they're winning.
In all fairness, I'm sure there's plenty of Republicans who would be disgusted by this article too. But I know the group you're talking about: they dominate not only the Republican party, but also the US. They have no concept of what the American Ideal is, thinking and acting with all the compassion and subtlety of leaders of a third world nation. Yet they are more comfortable telling others to love the US or leave it. Meanwhile, we take on the guilt and shame that they don't feel, and we want to leave -- even though in reality this is _our_ country: it belongs to the people who believe in the constitution and the bill of rights.
Bah. Rambling. Frustrated. What can actually be done? Anything?
Yes: in smaller communities where most people assume they will live long and well, and are not terribly angry, arming the populace is probably a fine idea.
However there are more than enough examples of messed up areas where violence gets worse as the number of guns goes up. Witness any poverty stricken gangland areas of the US for plenty of data. If there are enough people in an environment who are angry at the environment and aren't sure they'll live long anyways, then arming the populous just makes things worse.
In the end, guns are not themselves good or ill. They just take on the tone of the environment. I support gun rights in general, but I accept that in some places, for practical reasons, guns must be controlled.
As to the specifics, I guess we'll hash that out when people stop taking simplified, polarized views of it.
Cheers.
Can someone with mod points please mod up some of the excellent responses to Solandri's post? This has nothing to do with statistical margin of error when the company is proposing to test 100% of the beef. I feel his post is misguided in many ways, but rather than mod it down, modding up the thoughtful replies would be a lot more productive. I won't bother rehashing them myself.
Cheers.
Some three billion people in poverty in the world, each with a mind more powerful than any computer (as proven by this task), looking to make a miniscule amount of money for themselves and their families. And this is the best the market can come up with? Sheesh.
I don't know anything about anything (I didn't even go to college, ha!), but I am curious why a higher education system would be considered superior because "everyone has a chance to get into them"? I guess it would depend on why they're being kept out -- if smart, ambitious people are being kept out for financial reasons, that is a flaw. On the other hand, I get the sense that here in the US we ship everyone to college whether they have any interest or aptitude to learn anything, and we churn out tons of college grads who are of very low quality.
That's not to say we don't also have tons of college grads of very high quality. But it's not just about the number of people who get pushed through, is it? Perhaps that's not at all what you were implying, but I am curious.
Cheers.
I never saw them drink it warm in the UK, but they don't drink it ice cold either, which is what is common in the US. In the US there is generally no such thing as serving a beer too cold. My buddy keeps mugs in the freezer and his fridge on 35F so it forms some ice crystals when he pours it. In the UK they seem to serve it chilled to a specific temperature, say 55F. Kind of like a wine aficionado might do. It's definitely chilled but I can see plenty of yanks calling it "warm".
Also, it's pretty damn tasty.
Cheers.
The virus just needs to make sure it doesn't kill the host before it can spread to another. Or that it doesn't kill all possible hosts. HIV has been good about following those rules.
I don't think that applies to the issue at hand, though. This kind of parasite can really "spread", so it's important it doesn't kill the host at all.
Cheers.
C'mon: have you ever been part of a huge project? And you made no mistakes in the process?
If you haven't been part of a huge project, then I can understand why you are surprised mistakes get made. But in the world I've seen mistakes happen all the time no matter what the size of the project. In fact, larger projects tend to have more mistakes (though if run well, perhaps fewer as a percentage of total tasks).
This is a big mistake, it sucks for WB, and someone might lose their job. But if there's no surprises in a $150mm project, you haven't looked closely enough.
Cheers.
I think anyone who has taken the time to really get to know a pet parrot could tell you they seem to be about as smart as a dog or cat. Which is astonishing given their far smaller brain size. I had a couple cockatiels, who must have had brains like raisins, yet they exhibited fairly impressive learning abilities. Beyond just imitation of word sounds, they could connect those sounds to situations; I trained them to say "I'm hungry" whenever I brought them food. A more interesting one was the phrase "good bird", which I had used as generic praise, but which the male cockatiel spontaneously applied during and immediately following coitus with his mate.
Another one that impressed me was learning to walk on a glass table: at first they were afraid to step off of a plate placed on the table, looking with suspicion at the transparent surface. Eventually, with some crumbs on it, they were willing to carefully try walking on the crumb-sprinkled parts. Eventually they ventured out onto the clean parts as well, and within a few meals they had become totally comfortable walking on the glass.
In any case, it doesn't totally shock me that some birds test as self aware. I think there must be a different model for intelligence in birds. Much like other areas, birds seem to have adapted a weight-efficient means of carrying around what they need.
Cheers.
Well there's preview and then there's actually testing the links. Never have I had so much trouble with a post. This particular consciousness is now thoroughly embarassed :) Thanks for the fix.