I'm just saying that "hard facts" in science have a habit of changing radically as new evidence is presented.
Wrong. It is tremendously rare that scientific facts change radically because of new evidence.
It's a hard fact that the Sun orbits around the Earth... damn, someone just produced some evidence that shows that's wrong - we'll burn him because we don't agree with the evidence.
You must be kidding. To begin with, those who decided to burn people weren't the scientists.
Yours must be by far the most moronic and uninformed coment I've read today, and there are quite a few of them here.
The evidence is overwhelming. The earth is warming at an alarming rate, and it is our fault. What the hell is wrong with you?
We desperately need to get the religion and green politics out of our science so we can answer the questions that matter.
What you want is to rig science until the answers aren't those you don't like. The bad news for you is: the current scientific consensus is not due to green politics and religion. It is due to hard facts and carefull analysis. Which pretty much means, it is the truth, beyond reasonable doubt.
I have found that those who are pissed off so badly by this tend to be of the libertarian confession, and I think your tirade against "socialism" at the end is telling. Since the only reasonable solution to the current crisis is through concerted action, which means big government and restrictions, you are worried.
You would rather have the planet go to hell than giving up even a little of your "freedoms" to avoid that. Unfortunately, concerted action on global warming is the only solution, and is what is going to happen. Those whose position you are sharing are being discredited more and more, and are having a very hard time trying to look less kranky than you do.
I went through *three* iBook G3's before Apple replaced it with a shiny new iBook G4.
I've heard a lot about apple computers having hardware failures of one kind or another (including, and I find this particularily embarrassing, computers crashing during builds of large software packages because of overheating). This is a little bit of a scandal considering what they cost and how they are hyped.
I've heard quite a bit less stories about new dells, acers, etc failing so soon. I'll not say it doesn't happen, but a simple informal sampling seems to sugest that a modern apple has a far higher probability of breaking than other computers.
If you put every last bit of functionality into one device, you'll end up with one gadget that can do everything but excels at nothing.
It might be true for current gadgets, but I don't see why it will be true for future gadgets. Is this just lack of fantasy on your side?
I have no problem imagining a single gadget the size of a 9 volt battery that does everything very well and then some, including serving web pages and running seti@home, all while fed by a betavoltaic batery that lasts 20 years. Actually, looking back at the last 20 years, I find this all rather plausible, and I am only annoyed by the wait.
The iPod got famous, but I don't think it is an innovation. It is a result of careful industrial design, and beyond that it is simply overrated. It is just an mp3 player with a hard disk and a dial. The old macs were innovation, I will not deny that for a second. But lately there is nothing really technologically innovative coming out of apple.
Perhaps their real innovation is their marketing. I don't know how they do it, but even linux freaks buy macs for a lot more money than they would pay for an equiv. mainstream computer only to run linux software on it and put up with the single button mouse. And it sucks, and they complain, and *still* think that apple is great. Amazing.
But it's not lack of understanding of technology that is the problem.
Having finished the article, I still disagree. One of the subjects had the following technique to decide wether a site was legit or not: If she had an account on that website, she typed in her real username/password. If it was accepted, she decided the site was legit.
You should not forget that these were people that were either students or working for a university. These are the smart ones.
Anyone can sent a million phishing emails in private. The difference is social, not technological.
Aren't you contradicting yourself?
You can get fly-by-night hosting for $100/month, put up a web page, send a million phishing mails, and rip off a hundred for a few grand of revenue every month. All organized by you and your friend Charlie. The operation is run from your moms basement (where you live), and incredibly successfull for someone who just looks and behaves like a total loser.
And you are telling me it's not te technology??:-)
My favorite passage was the one describing how users can be fooled because they do not understand the domain name system, and thus think that, for instance www.ebay-security-users.com and www.ebay.com belong to the same hierarchy. Another similar one is the one where users fail to realize that a lock icon in the "chrome part" of the browser is somehow different from the same lock icon inside of the web page.
Phishers encounter an incredibly favorable ecosystem out there, with a high density of ignorant fools with credit cards, many of them quite ready to shell out money for herbal viagra, or to help the niece of Charles Taylor get her fortune out of Nepal. No wonder phishers strive like this.
The inherent nature of the State is that it screws up what it does. State run enterprise is bloated, inefficient, expensive and a political football.
The inherent nature of the state is that, whatever it does, there is always some smartass who thinks it is bloated, inefficient, expensive, and a politial football. Let me break it to you: the government does a lot of valuable things nobody else would do. That they always could be done better is trivially true, as pretty much everything anyone ever does could be done better.
The nature of the failings of the state are a simply consequence of the way the state works. Deeds done by the private sector have a different set of failings, also a consequence of how the private sector works. However, while we have a say in the workings of the former, we have little choice but to accept most decissions of owners of private property.
The private sector does better at some things, and at others the advantage is with the public sector.
I disagree. Some people seem to believe that the error was that the file wasn't removed. But the error was storing the password in cleartext, which is plain and simple incompetence.
Keeping the file is fine with me. But the password should have been encrypted right after it was typed in, and, if it was to be stored, it should have been stored encrypted as is done in/etc/shadow.
This bug sugests to me that the developers that were involved do not care or know too much about security.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should know that you never leave a critical password floating around in plain text. Not in memory, not in swap and you never print it to a bloody log file.
As a ubuntu user, who just looked at his line-noise password (for security, you know?), in FUCKING CLEARTEXT, I *really* want to know what the fuck they were thinking. And I want to know the name of the idiot who is responsible.
Writing a password to a log file shows a level of incompetence that is breathtaking.
What?? You replaced an amd64 box with a mac mini? You are crazy.
You could have spent the money on a reasonable case that doesn't make that much noise. It would have been a lot cheaper. The amd chips do not need that much cooling. I have an amd 64 X2 and no problems with the noise at all. Got a "Silentium T2" case and a nice zalman copper cpu cooler and the machine is quite as if it wasn't running. That wouldn't have cost you 120$ in total.
Since you still have the machine... have you tried fancontrol? Often times the wind tunnel effect comes from the fact that the fan speed is not throtled down as would be appropriate.
But what happens when your educational system is barely able to keep up with the current demand for educated workers?
And, in particular, what happens to those that are otherwise very nice people, but just don't get along with the education system? That is, those people that consistently fail exams, don't ''get'' any math, etc?
(I guess letting them starve is the libertarian way.)
Try out this book. Very nice. Head to #lisp on freenode to get help on how to install a Lisp environment.
Lisp is a very nice language with very little notation to get confused about (you need an editor to help you with the notation, though). It was my first language, and I still love it.
I poked my way through quite a few menues and found nothing helpfull. I tried to "tell" the bouncing madness to go away and it wasn't obvious. I tried a few less obvious things and none worked.
Your task would have been made easier had you known what the fuck you were doing instead of assuming that anything you tried would be right.
Haha. So I have to read a manual to resize a window, and to get a bunch of bouncing icons that are standing in my way to stop doing so? Sorry, but that's not what "intuitive" means. I've had better success with a few cell phone UIs, and certainly with a lot of other GUIs.
Mac OS X is probably fairly considered the leader in innovation and ease of use.
Well, it is a matter of taste i pressume. The other day I had to use a mac because the scanner where I work is attached to a mac. Well, anyway, to one of those apples with a hemispheric cpu box.
It annoyed the shit out of me.
Firstly, that bar with all the bouncing morphing icons. I really see zero value in that behaviour. Sure, it kinda looks nice for 10 seconds, but after that it simply is distracting.
After wading through some menues, I finally found the scanner program. The buttons were now behind the transparent bouncing button madness, and I couldn't click on them. I tried to resize the window in the usual manner (by clicking on a corner and dragging) and failed. I tried to convince the stupid icon bar that it shouldn't be on top all the time - but it wasn't "intuitive". Right cliking on it was not an option as apple mice have only one button (I have an opinion on that too, but I'll spare you). The modifier keys together with stomping on the mouse did produce menues, but these were irelevant to my plight.
So I kept moving the window to the left until one button came out under the bar and then I dragged the window to the right to step on the other button.
I found it pretty hard to use. Sure, windows and buttons were flying around bouncing and being transparent and doing assorted acrobatics, but my task was not at all made easier by all the eye candy.
To any usefull definition of the word 'know' the existence of god is knowable. He is not there. Believing in god is in the same category as believing in any other fantastic impossibility.
And I am not trying to be 'better' than religious people. The above is my honest opinion reached after lots of thought. If this makes me 'bad' in your eyes, well, so be it. I suppose 'good' is refusing to aknowledge truth because the truth is somewhat ugly. And because it implies that most of humanity lives in a state of self-delusion that they are not even enjoying.
it is not necessary to have infinite knowledge to know god does not exist. It is enough not to be personally attached to the idea of his existence to realize it is far less likely than the existence of real pigs (the animals, not humans you would call pigs for whatever reason) reciting Shakespeare while flying an f16 today.
Yeah, well. I haven't examined every single pig, so I might be wrong.
Not for stability, or security, or pricing, or modifiability, or all the great things that come to us from Unixland.
It's because we're all so cool.
Of course, pal!
OTOH, how cool can an expensive, virus-infected, spyware-laden memory hog fabricated by a bureaucratic and evil corporation be? Perhaps the users are not at all being superficial.
By promising to open their standard they have made a fairly dramatic political move. They are doing quite a bit of stuff lately that makes me think that they are very desperate.
Personally, I'd stay away from Python and use Java - Pythons nature (lack of data hiding, lack of strong typing) makes it very easy to have the program collapse into a horrendous mess.
Whoa. My FUD-o-meter almost melted on that.
Large amounts of software survive quite well without static typing or data hiding.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. It is tremendously rare that scientific facts change radically because of new evidence.
It's a hard fact that the Sun orbits around the Earth... damn, someone just produced some evidence that shows that's wrong - we'll burn him because we don't agree with the evidence.
You must be kidding. To begin with, those who decided to burn people weren't the scientists.
Yours must be by far the most moronic and uninformed coment I've read today, and there are quite a few of them here.
The evidence is overwhelming. The earth is warming at an alarming rate, and it is our fault. What the hell is wrong with you?
We desperately need to get the religion and green politics out of our science so we can answer the questions that matter.
What you want is to rig science until the answers aren't those you don't like. The bad news for you is: the current scientific consensus is not due to green politics and religion. It is due to hard facts and carefull analysis. Which pretty much means, it is the truth, beyond reasonable doubt.
I have found that those who are pissed off so badly by this tend to be of the libertarian confession, and I think your tirade against "socialism" at the end is telling. Since the only reasonable solution to the current crisis is through concerted action, which means big government and restrictions, you are worried.
You would rather have the planet go to hell than giving up even a little of your "freedoms" to avoid that. Unfortunately, concerted action on global warming is the only solution, and is what is going to happen. Those whose position you are sharing are being discredited more and more, and are having a very hard time trying to look less kranky than you do.
look up sealed crustless sandwich on wikipedia
I've heard a lot about apple computers having hardware failures of one kind or another (including, and I find this particularily embarrassing, computers crashing during builds of large software packages because of overheating). This is a little bit of a scandal considering what they cost and how they are hyped.
I've heard quite a bit less stories about new dells, acers, etc failing so soon. I'll not say it doesn't happen, but a simple informal sampling seems to sugest that a modern apple has a far higher probability of breaking than other computers.
Has anyone done the actual stats?
It might be true for current gadgets, but I don't see why it will be true for future gadgets. Is this just lack of fantasy on your side?
I have no problem imagining a single gadget the size of a 9 volt battery that does everything very well and then some, including serving web pages and running seti@home, all while fed by a betavoltaic batery that lasts 20 years. Actually, looking back at the last 20 years, I find this all rather plausible, and I am only annoyed by the wait.
The iPod got famous, but I don't think it is an innovation. It is a result of careful industrial design, and beyond that it is simply overrated. It is just an mp3 player with a hard disk and a dial. The old macs were innovation, I will not deny that for a second. But lately there is nothing really technologically innovative coming out of apple.
Perhaps their real innovation is their marketing. I don't know how they do it, but even linux freaks buy macs for a lot more money than they would pay for an equiv. mainstream computer only to run linux software on it and put up with the single button mouse. And it sucks, and they complain, and *still* think that apple is great. Amazing.
Having finished the article, I still disagree. One of the subjects had the following technique to decide wether a site was legit or not: If she had an account on that website, she typed in her real username/password. If it was accepted, she decided the site was legit.
You should not forget that these were people that were either students or working for a university. These are the smart ones.
Aren't you contradicting yourself?
You can get fly-by-night hosting for $100/month, put up a web page, send a million phishing mails, and rip off a hundred for a few grand of revenue every month. All organized by you and your friend Charlie. The operation is run from your moms basement (where you live), and incredibly successfull for someone who just looks and behaves like a total loser.
And you are telling me it's not te technology?? :-)
My favorite passage was the one describing how users can be fooled because they do not understand the domain name system, and thus think that, for instance www.ebay-security-users.com and www.ebay.com belong to the same hierarchy. Another similar one is the one where users fail to realize that a lock icon in the "chrome part" of the browser is somehow different from the same lock icon inside of the web page.
Phishers encounter an incredibly favorable ecosystem out there, with a high density of ignorant fools with credit cards, many of them quite ready to shell out money for herbal viagra, or to help the niece of Charles Taylor get her fortune out of Nepal. No wonder phishers strive like this.
(Yeah, I know it's not Nepal)
The inherent nature of the state is that, whatever it does, there is always some smartass who thinks it is bloated, inefficient, expensive, and a politial football. Let me break it to you: the government does a lot of valuable things nobody else would do. That they always could be done better is trivially true, as pretty much everything anyone ever does could be done better.
The nature of the failings of the state are a simply consequence of the way the state works. Deeds done by the private sector have a different set of failings, also a consequence of how the private sector works. However, while we have a say in the workings of the former, we have little choice but to accept most decissions of owners of private property.
The private sector does better at some things, and at others the advantage is with the public sector.
I disagree. Some people seem to believe that the error was that the file wasn't removed. But the error was storing the password in cleartext, which is plain and simple incompetence.
/etc/shadow.
Keeping the file is fine with me. But the password should have been encrypted right after it was typed in, and, if it was to be stored, it should have been stored encrypted as is done in
This bug sugests to me that the developers that were involved do not care or know too much about security.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should know that you never leave a critical password floating around in plain text. Not in memory, not in swap and you never print it to a bloody log file.
As a ubuntu user, who just looked at his line-noise password (for security, you know?), in FUCKING CLEARTEXT, I *really* want to know what the fuck they were thinking. And I want to know the name of the idiot who is responsible.
Writing a password to a log file shows a level of incompetence that is breathtaking.
At this rate, Larry Wall might get a Turing in 2040. :-)
As far as I am concerned, he deserves a pantheon in the Turing tarpit.
What?? You replaced an amd64 box with a mac mini? You are crazy.
You could have spent the money on a reasonable case that doesn't make that much noise. It would have been a lot cheaper. The amd chips do not need that much cooling. I have an amd 64 X2 and no problems with the noise at all. Got a "Silentium T2" case and a nice zalman copper cpu cooler and the machine is quite as if it wasn't running. That wouldn't have cost you 120$ in total.
Since you still have the machine... have you tried fancontrol? Often times the wind tunnel effect comes from the fact that the fan speed is not throtled down as would be appropriate.
"Optimism is an accident waiting to happen".
And, in particular, what happens to those that are otherwise very nice people, but just don't get along with the education system? That is, those people that consistently fail exams, don't ''get'' any math, etc?
(I guess letting them starve is the libertarian way.)
Try out this book. Very nice. Head to #lisp on freenode to get help on how to install a Lisp environment.
Lisp is a very nice language with very little notation to get confused about (you need an editor to help you with the notation, though). It was my first language, and I still love it.
I poked my way through quite a few menues and found nothing helpfull. I tried to "tell" the bouncing madness to go away and it wasn't obvious. I tried a few less obvious things and none worked.
Your task would have been made easier had you known what the fuck you were doing instead of assuming that anything you tried would be right.
Haha. So I have to read a manual to resize a window, and to get a bunch of bouncing icons that are standing in my way to stop doing so? Sorry, but that's not what "intuitive" means. I've had better success with a few cell phone UIs, and certainly with a lot of other GUIs.
Well, it is a matter of taste i pressume. The other day I had to use a mac because the scanner where I work is attached to a mac. Well, anyway, to one of those apples with a hemispheric cpu box.
It annoyed the shit out of me.
Firstly, that bar with all the bouncing morphing icons. I really see zero value in that behaviour. Sure, it kinda looks nice for 10 seconds, but after that it simply is distracting.
After wading through some menues, I finally found the scanner program. The buttons were now behind the transparent bouncing button madness, and I couldn't click on them. I tried to resize the window in the usual manner (by clicking on a corner and dragging) and failed. I tried to convince the stupid icon bar that it shouldn't be on top all the time - but it wasn't "intuitive". Right cliking on it was not an option as apple mice have only one button (I have an opinion on that too, but I'll spare you). The modifier keys together with stomping on the mouse did produce menues, but these were irelevant to my plight.
So I kept moving the window to the left until one button came out under the bar and then I dragged the window to the right to step on the other button.
I found it pretty hard to use. Sure, windows and buttons were flying around bouncing and being transparent and doing assorted acrobatics, but my task was not at all made easier by all the eye candy.
To any usefull definition of the word 'know' the existence of god is knowable. He is not there. Believing in god is in the same category as believing in any other fantastic impossibility.
And I am not trying to be 'better' than religious people. The above is my honest opinion reached after lots of thought. If this makes me 'bad' in your eyes, well, so be it. I suppose 'good' is refusing to aknowledge truth because the truth is somewhat ugly. And because it implies that most of humanity lives in a state of self-delusion that they are not even enjoying.
it is not necessary to have infinite knowledge to know god does not exist. It is enough not to be personally attached to the idea of his existence to realize it is far less likely than the existence of real pigs (the animals, not humans you would call pigs for whatever reason) reciting Shakespeare while flying an f16 today.
Yeah, well. I haven't examined every single pig, so I might be wrong.
It's because we're all so cool.
Of course, pal!
OTOH, how cool can an expensive, virus-infected, spyware-laden memory hog fabricated by a bureaucratic and evil corporation be? Perhaps the users are not at all being superficial.
By promising to open their standard they have made a fairly dramatic political move. They are doing quite a bit of stuff lately that makes me think that they are very desperate.
It seems that the good FF folks just forgot to make sure the cache gets flushed. So you can fix FF's "memory leak" easily. See here.
Whoa. My FUD-o-meter almost melted on that.
Large amounts of software survive quite well without static typing or data hiding.