That's how user testing should be done. It is really much too difficult for someone familiar with the program or OS to see what is not obvious or confusing to a novice user. The people that program the UI don't always think like a user - they usually think like a programmer, and that doesn't always work.
If ID posits that Darwinian natural selection isn't a sufficient explanation, then evolutionary biology agrees with ID. Current theory states that evolution is best explained by natural selection, but there are also extensions to strict Darwinian selection - some of which (like sexual selection) Darwin himself proposed, but others that he could not have foreseen. Things like cross-species gene transfer in plants, for example, resulting in triploid or quadruploid hybrids. As these types of plants constitute the majority of our grain crops, well, clearly that's unimportant.
Even without taking the extensions into account, you can't explain natural selection without genetics. If Darwin had discovered Mendel's manuscript, he wouldn't have had as hard a time as he did explaining why natural selection works. He had to make a vague statement that offspring resemble the parents, with no knowledge of genes or DNA. Genetics (which you want to discount here) have provided some of the strongest evidence for natural selection and common descent. If ID wants to kill Darwinian natural selection, genetics needs to be taken down in the process. They can't have it both ways.
The ID movement has one and only one goal in mind: To push the idea that there must be a Creator, because there is no other explanation for the world as we know it. It isn't explicitly stated any more (primarily to make the "theory" more attractive in secular education institutions), but historically the Creator is the Judeo-Christian God. ID only attacks Darwin because Darwin is a nice easy target, thanks to a century of anti-science rhetoric on the part of the wilfully ignorant.
Incidentally, Darwin never said that evolution means there is no god. All he said was that god wasn't directing evolution. There are a great deal of evolutionary theories prior to Darwin's that presented no difficulty for the church. Alfred Russell Wallace was the man that stated bluntly that evolutionary theory is incompatible with religion. He just didn't publish a big thick book like Darwin did - even though he did publish first.
First, just a point to reiterate: "Darwinism" doesn't exist except in the minds of ID types. Neither does "Evolutionism" - it's not an ideology, not a belief system, it's a theory. Correctly, the theory of evolution through natural selection. Evolution = observed fact; natural selection = theory for major mechanism through which evolution occurs.
Second, as evolutionary theory is the underpinning of modern biology, I have to disagree with you. I can't think of a single position in biology where you could reasonably expect to get anywhere without understanding evolution. I sure as hell would not want to go to a doctor that didn't understand basic biology - and evolution is basic biology.
You can understand physics without needing to know string theory. Sure, there are things I'll never understand without learning string theory, but I can understand vectors and forces and acceleration and electrical flow without knowing string theory. In biology however, not knowing or understanding Darwinian evolution means you can't do a damn thing. Without common descent, you can't expect a drug that works in a mouse to also work in humans. You can't expect that genes excised from organism A can be successfully placed in organism B. You can't understand that captive tigers of indeterminate parentage are not the hope of the several dwindling subspecies in the wild. You can't understand that conservation means conserving behavior as well as genetics. People who do not understand these things are making decisions about how to run our country, how to preserve our natural resources, and what medical resources will be available to citizens. That scares me. It should scare you.
Trying to understand biology without Darwinian evolution is like trying to understand math while limiting yourself to whole, positive numbers (and dropping the zero). You can do it, you might be able to learn a little, but you're crippling yourself for no logical reason.
The argument that it isn't a big deal is flawed. An assault on science is an assault on science, and it should be treated as such. If you accept that evolution isn't that important, what happens when the ID proponents start going after geology for not supporting young earth theory? Do you just accept that there's no job you can think of that depends on valid radiocarbon dating? Where does it end? Why bother having advances in science if we're just going to give up when some small but vocal group starts yelling?
What exactly is that article supposed to demonstrate? That a person can tell the difference between a randomly eroded pebble and an arrowhead? What presupposition is that even supposed to address? How is that relevant to evolutionary biology?
There isn't anything on that site worth linking to, anyway. Not one thing. If you find a coherent, well-reasoned, fact-based argument on that site, it's an accident.
Here's a hint for you (same one I tell my students): If you want to kill evolution, you can't just prove it wrong. You have to show that it is a fatally flawed argument, AND also present a new theory that does a BETTER job of explaining everything that evolution explains. Furthermore, the new theory has to be BETTER than evolutionary theory at PREDICTING what will happen. It is not enough to explain what we already know. Scientific theory has to have a predictive value. Creation garbage has zero predictive value, because nobody knows what the creator will do. Today we have the world as we know it, tomorrow maybe he decides to bring back dinosaurs just for the hell of it.
You should also keep in mind two things: First, if you want to kill evolution as a theory, you need to start with a thorough understanding of what it is (and what science is). You can't present a cogent argument if you don't understand the facts. Second, there have been a lot of very intelligent people, highly educated people, who have thoroughly and rigorously tested evolutionary theory over the last 150 years. A great number of these people were not fans of the theory, and more than a few had reasons to want to disprove it. Despite this, it's still the best explanation of how life came to be, and where life is going, and how it happens on a generation-to-generation basis.
But yeah, that argument about the pebble vs. arrowhead, that makes all of the above moot. Guess I'll tear up my Ph.D. now and start witnessing on the streetcorners.
Uh... because there is exactly zero evidence supporting other theories? Because other theories are largely unscientific, untestable, and not falsifiable? Because creationists still don't understand that evidence against one theory do NOT automatically equate to support for an alternate theory*? Because evidence from every branch of science, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to physics to zoology all support the currently accepted theory? You know, those sorts of things kind of tend to make people really, really tired of dealing with folks like Ben Stein, who remain obstinately and willfully ignorant.
(*e.g., if this fruit is not an orange, that does not mean it is automatically an apple... heck, could be a kumquat, for all you know).
Yeah, well try uploading anything to an SFTP server. Comcast throttles the hell out of that. They've done it in every state in which I am a customer. I know it isn't an issue on the server end, as my server is on a dedicated gigabit line. When I'm at home it takes forever to upload anything. For some reason Comcast assumes my encrypted traffic must be piracy, I guess, rather than realizing that only an idiot would use plain FTP for uploading anything important (like data backups).
Based on the quality of service I've gotten from Comcast so far, I'm not willing to pay them more for promises until I can see evidence that they actually deliver. If I'm dropping $150 a month, for starters I want real upload speeds and a dedicated IP, with no restrictions on how I choose to use my bandwidth. If I want to run a server from home, for $1800 + tax a year I ought to be able to do so.
Arsenault [...] made an analogy about the tradeoffs of updating older software to his desire to add airbags to his 1992 Toyota: He can (and will) actually get it done, but it's going to cost him.
The MS chief security advisor drives a 1992 Toyota? Really? Two things come to mind here: Either Microsoft doesn't take security seriously enough to even give this guy a decent salary, or the urge to keep supporting outdated legacy crap is so ingrained at the company that even the guys at the top can't drop old tech for something better.
Of course it also makes me wonder, why can this guy take supporting a '92 car seriously, and yet the company he works for can't even make sure that the printer you bought last year will be supported in the latest OS?
What a great idea! We'll all start on this just as soon as you show me how to code a PDF in a text editor. Here's a couple of lines from a random PDF I opened:
If I actually have to tell you what is meant by the term "beta software", well, perhaps you should not be reading/. in the first place. At least send the complaint to http://feedback.mozilla.org/ rather than here.
Now if only we can definitively tackle the two biggest examples of attempted vendor lock-in alive (Exchange and MS Office), we'd be set.
I never understood what people saw in Exchange. Do companies really use the calendar features that extensively? I'd think it would be worth the pain of having to write stuff down in a day planner just to dump Exchange in favor of an open email client and an IMAP server. Of course, I manually enter all my stuff into my phone, iCal or Google Calendar already, and it's not that big a pain.
As for MS Office, the lockdown issue there really bothers me. As a Mac and Windows user, I'm really annoyed at the major differences between Office versions on the two platforms. Schneier states that the "pain of learning a new interface" is part of the lockdown strategy - so MS, to encourage lockdown, radically changes the interface on both platforms, while ensuring that neither new Office version is consistent with or compatible with the other (lack of VisualBasic in Mac Office, breaking all third-party add-ins as a result, plus problems opening/closing files made on the other platform, etc.) That is actually hurting them, because the pain of dealing with the radically different interfaces (and lack of feature parity for Mac users) is actually encouraging me to drop Office 08 and go open-source. I'm already dealing with learning a new interface, etc., so why learn theirs when they are making it so damn hard this time around?
Interesting article from David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) regarding the future of music. His take includes the statement that artist royalties usually end up between $1.40 - $1.60 per album. So, if you want to contribute, pirate away, and send the artist $2 - you'll be paying them more than the RIAA.
Of course you're screwing over the songwriters, but who gives a crap about writers? They aren't important at all. Got it? Great. Now that we have the music thing settled, can somebody tell me why all the TV shows are reruns lately...?
By that rationale, Microsoft would be better off dropping the prices on their own software to a level similar to that charged by the forgers. If people are unwilling to pay $XXX for Office, but will gladly shell out $XX, Microsoft might make less money per sale but would be making more sales (and spending less money tracking down forgeries, as the incentive to forge a product drops with the price: Saving $5 by grabbing a suspicious copy of Office isn't a good deal, where saving $150 might look tempting enough to ignore the dubious origins of the disc).
In fact Microsoft knows this to be true. They've been offering their products at a lower rate in India and other countries for a while now, to reduce piracy. Of course they don't do that in North America or Europe, unless you count the low-cost deals they strike with universities.
There are a lot of people who don't feel right about stealing software, but change their minds when they see the astronomical price tag (and then are asked to buy it again, at the same price, when the new version comes out). If Microsoft would just cut prices across the board, these people would be much more likely to pay rather than steal and feel guilty.
I love how Microsoft's take on the merger is that it will create more competition. Why is it that any time a big company swallows a smaller one, we're told that having fewer players in the field will increase competition? Do people actually buy that line of bull? Someone get these guys a dictionary.
While I can see desktops becoming smaller, I can't see a desktop-type setup disappearing completely in favor of laptops or other portables, for one simple reason: Size. Working on a light, portable laptop means making certain sacrifices, such as screen size and in most cases the loss of a full keyboard (that number pad is really handy for a lot of reasons!).
In the short term, desktops will continue to exist because of the ease of use and the ability to more easily perform upgrades. Laptops are still higher cost items than desktops because of the need for reduced size and power consumption of components and the customization necessary to make them fit specific form factors. Desktop parts are not just cheaper because of size, they're also cheaper because they are relatively interchangeable as well. Until you can go to the local computer store and buy boxed retail laptop parts off the shelf for an assemble-it-yourself model, they are not going to be competitive in terms of cost of ownership. I've gone through 3 laptops in the last 5 years, and have been using the same desktop the entire time, only upgrading HDD and memory. If I could have dropped a new motherboard and faster processor into one of those laptops, I could have extended its useful lifespan. However, the continuing ability to package greater power into a smaller component will trickle down to desktops, allowing us to have much smaller setups without sacrificing the features like ease of upgrade that make them popular. Goodbye mini-ATX, hello pico-ATX.
In the long term, I can envision a scenario where your computer is eventually reduced to a fairly small handheld device using a standardized, uniform docking mechanism that could allow you to drop it into a dock/battery charger at work or at home or at a public terminal for access to a full keyboard and monitor, while still allowing you to work using only the handheld when a full setup is unavailable or unnecessary. Imagine an iPhone-sized device with enough storage space and processing power to be your personal computer. The only drawback to this sort of concept is that it would mean computer manufacturers would have to agree on what sort of docking mechanism to use, whenther physical or wireless, what kinds of standards it would take, and so forth.
Spoken like a person who couldn't get accepted at either. Show me your diploma before you start making jokes about which university is better than any other.
For the record, there are 15 public universities in Michigan. Why don't you try attending one of them? It's a better use of your time than posting stupid comments on/. just to be an ass.
So now we should start teaching every alternative explanation possible when introducing new science subjects? This is what the ID crowd wants. They want to spread uncertainty. They want people to take their thoroughly unscientific ideology and present it as if it were a falsifiable, testable scientific theory. This is dumb. We don't teach known facts well enough as it is to be wasting time presenting evidence for ideas that have been proven to be long dead. If we want to teach kids something new, we should teach them to be critical thinkers.
Teaching biology without evolutionary theory is like teaching math without arabic numerals or the concept of zero.
I know more about my relationship with my contacts than any automated program does. I'm a human. Relationships between others are what I am genetically programmed to remember and sort. Computers do this through plain text; humans do it through social context, which extends beyond a single email and into real-world interactions. The sheer number of times I might send email to a specific person has no bearing on how important replies from that contact may be to me. I'm sure most people email coworkers much more often than they email the boss or anyone higher up, but that does not mean I want email from the person who signs my paycheck to be dropped lower in my inbox.
This is why I use IMAP and a small number of simple sorting rules. Messages from X go into box Y. Obvious spam is quarantined. Both are double-checked by me. If Yahoo wants to improve the email experience, they should start by working with others to fix the broken mail protocols that allowed the proliferation of spam in the first place, not find a way to make social networking spam more obvious in my inbox.
The spine is central nervous system (CNS) just like the brain, while the remainder of the nerves (such as in the hand) are peripheral (PNS). Nerve regrowth is inhibited in the CNS. Peripheral nerves are not under this inhibition. It's quite a bit more complicated than that, but you can learn about why this is true if you want to take a developmental biology course. You'll learn all about nerve growth factors and neural crest cells. (If you had been one of my students, you'd know this already!)
My biggest problem with this sort of science is that the general public usually gets everything about it wrong, thanks to bad reporting or poor understanding of science in general. Someone publishes an article stating that morph A of gene X is found more often than one would statistically expect in a number of persons with a specific condition, but when the public gets the results we get headlines screaming "OMFG TEH GHEY GENE FOUND" and that kind of crap, because it makes better press. Yes, there are conditions that can be caused by an aberration in a single gene (albinism, narcolepsy, etc.) but more often than not genes that control complex behaviors require multiple interactions between multiple genes; until proven otherwise you should always understand that publication of a finding like this is indicitave of a contributing factor, not a causal factor, for a given condition.
Trust me. I do neuroscience for a living. When you're preparing the publication for submission, you always work your hardest to ensure that everything is accurate and properly phrased to be crystal clear about the limitations and drawbacks of the findings, only to have a reporter read nothing more than the abstract and get everything wrong. Don't blame the societal excuses on the scientists. People inclined to take the easy way out don't end up with PhDs, research careers, and articles in Nature.
Try SwissMemory. I have an older 512 MB SwissBit USB knife; my wife accidentally washed it (I left it in my pocket). The flash drive was completely fine afterwards. Didn't even hurt the LED flashlight. Far as I know the company makes solid memory, and I haven't heard anything about patent trolling on their part.
Ha. My brother-in-law called me a week or so ago with a dead drive, I told him to freeze it. He was skeptical but he gave it a go; he managed to rescue his girlfriend's stuff from the thing and couldn't thank me enough.
I read an article previously showing evidence that corporations are no longer just pushing for laws, they are actually drafting legislation and then giving it to friendly congresspersons. (Been happening for a long time, despite efforts in the mid-90s to curtail it.) This leads me to ask - is this new bill the result of pressure from the RIAA, or from the RIAA itself acting through a representative that was purchased specifically for this type of action?
The only way you or I will ever have the ability to influence Congress is if (a) corporate and private donations to individual persons in government are banned, or (b) you suddenly inherit Bill Gates' stock portfolio. Until then, the laws are going to be largely written the way big business wants them to be written - because more often than you realize big business is holding the pen.
The really, really sad thing is that tactics like this often exclude anyone not running Windows - not because the site won't actually work in any other browser, but because some web programmer was too lazy to write a browser detection script that actually worked. I've used user agent switchers to let myself in to quite a few "IE only" websites just to find that they worked quite well in FF once I got past the bouncer at the entry page. At least one such site (a page on a US.gov site, actually) was using a browser detect script that hadn't been changed since IE5. Really.
Poke around in some of the source code. You might be surprised.
First: If you don't think FF has an in-built spell check you might want to try a version newer than 1.5 before posting.
Second: Downloading IE7Pro? In what way does downloading an external front-end / add-on for a web browser substitute for creating a usable browser in the first place? Firefox, Opera or Safari, out of the box, no add-ons / extensions, are much more user-friendly and contain more functionality than IE7. If you have to download and install an additional program to get your browser close to par with the others, you're using the wrong browser. If MS ever figures that out, we might be getting somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how user testing should be done. It is really much too difficult for someone familiar with the program or OS to see what is not obvious or confusing to a novice user. The people that program the UI don't always think like a user - they usually think like a programmer, and that doesn't always work.
If ID posits that Darwinian natural selection isn't a sufficient explanation, then evolutionary biology agrees with ID. Current theory states that evolution is best explained by natural selection, but there are also extensions to strict Darwinian selection - some of which (like sexual selection) Darwin himself proposed, but others that he could not have foreseen. Things like cross-species gene transfer in plants, for example, resulting in triploid or quadruploid hybrids. As these types of plants constitute the majority of our grain crops, well, clearly that's unimportant.
Even without taking the extensions into account, you can't explain natural selection without genetics. If Darwin had discovered Mendel's manuscript, he wouldn't have had as hard a time as he did explaining why natural selection works. He had to make a vague statement that offspring resemble the parents, with no knowledge of genes or DNA. Genetics (which you want to discount here) have provided some of the strongest evidence for natural selection and common descent. If ID wants to kill Darwinian natural selection, genetics needs to be taken down in the process. They can't have it both ways.
The ID movement has one and only one goal in mind: To push the idea that there must be a Creator, because there is no other explanation for the world as we know it. It isn't explicitly stated any more (primarily to make the "theory" more attractive in secular education institutions), but historically the Creator is the Judeo-Christian God. ID only attacks Darwin because Darwin is a nice easy target, thanks to a century of anti-science rhetoric on the part of the wilfully ignorant.
Incidentally, Darwin never said that evolution means there is no god. All he said was that god wasn't directing evolution. There are a great deal of evolutionary theories prior to Darwin's that presented no difficulty for the church. Alfred Russell Wallace was the man that stated bluntly that evolutionary theory is incompatible with religion. He just didn't publish a big thick book like Darwin did - even though he did publish first.
First, just a point to reiterate: "Darwinism" doesn't exist except in the minds of ID types. Neither does "Evolutionism" - it's not an ideology, not a belief system, it's a theory. Correctly, the theory of evolution through natural selection. Evolution = observed fact; natural selection = theory for major mechanism through which evolution occurs.
Second, as evolutionary theory is the underpinning of modern biology, I have to disagree with you. I can't think of a single position in biology where you could reasonably expect to get anywhere without understanding evolution. I sure as hell would not want to go to a doctor that didn't understand basic biology - and evolution is basic biology.
You can understand physics without needing to know string theory. Sure, there are things I'll never understand without learning string theory, but I can understand vectors and forces and acceleration and electrical flow without knowing string theory. In biology however, not knowing or understanding Darwinian evolution means you can't do a damn thing. Without common descent, you can't expect a drug that works in a mouse to also work in humans. You can't expect that genes excised from organism A can be successfully placed in organism B. You can't understand that captive tigers of indeterminate parentage are not the hope of the several dwindling subspecies in the wild. You can't understand that conservation means conserving behavior as well as genetics. People who do not understand these things are making decisions about how to run our country, how to preserve our natural resources, and what medical resources will be available to citizens. That scares me. It should scare you.
Trying to understand biology without Darwinian evolution is like trying to understand math while limiting yourself to whole, positive numbers (and dropping the zero). You can do it, you might be able to learn a little, but you're crippling yourself for no logical reason.
The argument that it isn't a big deal is flawed. An assault on science is an assault on science, and it should be treated as such. If you accept that evolution isn't that important, what happens when the ID proponents start going after geology for not supporting young earth theory? Do you just accept that there's no job you can think of that depends on valid radiocarbon dating? Where does it end? Why bother having advances in science if we're just going to give up when some small but vocal group starts yelling?
What exactly is that article supposed to demonstrate? That a person can tell the difference between a randomly eroded pebble and an arrowhead? What presupposition is that even supposed to address? How is that relevant to evolutionary biology?
There isn't anything on that site worth linking to, anyway. Not one thing. If you find a coherent, well-reasoned, fact-based argument on that site, it's an accident.
Here's a hint for you (same one I tell my students): If you want to kill evolution, you can't just prove it wrong. You have to show that it is a fatally flawed argument, AND also present a new theory that does a BETTER job of explaining everything that evolution explains. Furthermore, the new theory has to be BETTER than evolutionary theory at PREDICTING what will happen. It is not enough to explain what we already know. Scientific theory has to have a predictive value. Creation garbage has zero predictive value, because nobody knows what the creator will do. Today we have the world as we know it, tomorrow maybe he decides to bring back dinosaurs just for the hell of it.
You should also keep in mind two things: First, if you want to kill evolution as a theory, you need to start with a thorough understanding of what it is (and what science is). You can't present a cogent argument if you don't understand the facts. Second, there have been a lot of very intelligent people, highly educated people, who have thoroughly and rigorously tested evolutionary theory over the last 150 years. A great number of these people were not fans of the theory, and more than a few had reasons to want to disprove it. Despite this, it's still the best explanation of how life came to be, and where life is going, and how it happens on a generation-to-generation basis.
But yeah, that argument about the pebble vs. arrowhead, that makes all of the above moot. Guess I'll tear up my Ph.D. now and start witnessing on the streetcorners.
Uh... because there is exactly zero evidence supporting other theories? Because other theories are largely unscientific, untestable, and not falsifiable? Because creationists still don't understand that evidence against one theory do NOT automatically equate to support for an alternate theory*? Because evidence from every branch of science, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to physics to zoology all support the currently accepted theory? You know, those sorts of things kind of tend to make people really, really tired of dealing with folks like Ben Stein, who remain obstinately and willfully ignorant.
(*e.g., if this fruit is not an orange, that does not mean it is automatically an apple... heck, could be a kumquat, for all you know).
Yeah, well try uploading anything to an SFTP server. Comcast throttles the hell out of that. They've done it in every state in which I am a customer. I know it isn't an issue on the server end, as my server is on a dedicated gigabit line. When I'm at home it takes forever to upload anything. For some reason Comcast assumes my encrypted traffic must be piracy, I guess, rather than realizing that only an idiot would use plain FTP for uploading anything important (like data backups).
Based on the quality of service I've gotten from Comcast so far, I'm not willing to pay them more for promises until I can see evidence that they actually deliver. If I'm dropping $150 a month, for starters I want real upload speeds and a dedicated IP, with no restrictions on how I choose to use my bandwidth. If I want to run a server from home, for $1800 + tax a year I ought to be able to do so.
The MS chief security advisor drives a 1992 Toyota? Really? Two things come to mind here: Either Microsoft doesn't take security seriously enough to even give this guy a decent salary, or the urge to keep supporting outdated legacy crap is so ingrained at the company that even the guys at the top can't drop old tech for something better.
Of course it also makes me wonder, why can this guy take supporting a '92 car seriously, and yet the company he works for can't even make sure that the printer you bought last year will be supported in the latest OS?
Oh yeah, that's TOTALLY easier than HTML. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner? A new golden age shall dawn on the Intertubes.
If I actually have to tell you what is meant by the term "beta software", well, perhaps you should not be reading /. in the first place. At least send the complaint to http://feedback.mozilla.org/ rather than here.
Now if only we can definitively tackle the two biggest examples of attempted vendor lock-in alive (Exchange and MS Office), we'd be set.
I never understood what people saw in Exchange. Do companies really use the calendar features that extensively? I'd think it would be worth the pain of having to write stuff down in a day planner just to dump Exchange in favor of an open email client and an IMAP server. Of course, I manually enter all my stuff into my phone, iCal or Google Calendar already, and it's not that big a pain.
As for MS Office, the lockdown issue there really bothers me. As a Mac and Windows user, I'm really annoyed at the major differences between Office versions on the two platforms. Schneier states that the "pain of learning a new interface" is part of the lockdown strategy - so MS, to encourage lockdown, radically changes the interface on both platforms, while ensuring that neither new Office version is consistent with or compatible with the other (lack of VisualBasic in Mac Office, breaking all third-party add-ins as a result, plus problems opening/closing files made on the other platform, etc.) That is actually hurting them, because the pain of dealing with the radically different interfaces (and lack of feature parity for Mac users) is actually encouraging me to drop Office 08 and go open-source. I'm already dealing with learning a new interface, etc., so why learn theirs when they are making it so damn hard this time around?
Interesting article from David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) regarding the future of music. His take includes the statement that artist royalties usually end up between $1.40 - $1.60 per album. So, if you want to contribute, pirate away, and send the artist $2 - you'll be paying them more than the RIAA.
Of course you're screwing over the songwriters, but who gives a crap about writers? They aren't important at all. Got it? Great. Now that we have the music thing settled, can somebody tell me why all the TV shows are reruns lately...?
By that rationale, Microsoft would be better off dropping the prices on their own software to a level similar to that charged by the forgers. If people are unwilling to pay $XXX for Office, but will gladly shell out $XX, Microsoft might make less money per sale but would be making more sales (and spending less money tracking down forgeries, as the incentive to forge a product drops with the price: Saving $5 by grabbing a suspicious copy of Office isn't a good deal, where saving $150 might look tempting enough to ignore the dubious origins of the disc).
In fact Microsoft knows this to be true. They've been offering their products at a lower rate in India and other countries for a while now, to reduce piracy. Of course they don't do that in North America or Europe, unless you count the low-cost deals they strike with universities.
There are a lot of people who don't feel right about stealing software, but change their minds when they see the astronomical price tag (and then are asked to buy it again, at the same price, when the new version comes out). If Microsoft would just cut prices across the board, these people would be much more likely to pay rather than steal and feel guilty.
I love how Microsoft's take on the merger is that it will create more competition. Why is it that any time a big company swallows a smaller one, we're told that having fewer players in the field will increase competition? Do people actually buy that line of bull? Someone get these guys a dictionary.
While I can see desktops becoming smaller, I can't see a desktop-type setup disappearing completely in favor of laptops or other portables, for one simple reason: Size. Working on a light, portable laptop means making certain sacrifices, such as screen size and in most cases the loss of a full keyboard (that number pad is really handy for a lot of reasons!).
In the short term, desktops will continue to exist because of the ease of use and the ability to more easily perform upgrades. Laptops are still higher cost items than desktops because of the need for reduced size and power consumption of components and the customization necessary to make them fit specific form factors. Desktop parts are not just cheaper because of size, they're also cheaper because they are relatively interchangeable as well. Until you can go to the local computer store and buy boxed retail laptop parts off the shelf for an assemble-it-yourself model, they are not going to be competitive in terms of cost of ownership. I've gone through 3 laptops in the last 5 years, and have been using the same desktop the entire time, only upgrading HDD and memory. If I could have dropped a new motherboard and faster processor into one of those laptops, I could have extended its useful lifespan. However, the continuing ability to package greater power into a smaller component will trickle down to desktops, allowing us to have much smaller setups without sacrificing the features like ease of upgrade that make them popular. Goodbye mini-ATX, hello pico-ATX.
In the long term, I can envision a scenario where your computer is eventually reduced to a fairly small handheld device using a standardized, uniform docking mechanism that could allow you to drop it into a dock/battery charger at work or at home or at a public terminal for access to a full keyboard and monitor, while still allowing you to work using only the handheld when a full setup is unavailable or unnecessary. Imagine an iPhone-sized device with enough storage space and processing power to be your personal computer. The only drawback to this sort of concept is that it would mean computer manufacturers would have to agree on what sort of docking mechanism to use, whenther physical or wireless, what kinds of standards it would take, and so forth.
Spoken like a person who couldn't get accepted at either. Show me your diploma before you start making jokes about which university is better than any other.
/. just to be an ass.
For the record, there are 15 public universities in Michigan. Why don't you try attending one of them? It's a better use of your time than posting stupid comments on
So now we should start teaching every alternative explanation possible when introducing new science subjects? This is what the ID crowd wants. They want to spread uncertainty. They want people to take their thoroughly unscientific ideology and present it as if it were a falsifiable, testable scientific theory. This is dumb. We don't teach known facts well enough as it is to be wasting time presenting evidence for ideas that have been proven to be long dead. If we want to teach kids something new, we should teach them to be critical thinkers.
Teaching biology without evolutionary theory is like teaching math without arabic numerals or the concept of zero.
I know more about my relationship with my contacts than any automated program does. I'm a human. Relationships between others are what I am genetically programmed to remember and sort. Computers do this through plain text; humans do it through social context, which extends beyond a single email and into real-world interactions. The sheer number of times I might send email to a specific person has no bearing on how important replies from that contact may be to me. I'm sure most people email coworkers much more often than they email the boss or anyone higher up, but that does not mean I want email from the person who signs my paycheck to be dropped lower in my inbox.
This is why I use IMAP and a small number of simple sorting rules. Messages from X go into box Y. Obvious spam is quarantined. Both are double-checked by me. If Yahoo wants to improve the email experience, they should start by working with others to fix the broken mail protocols that allowed the proliferation of spam in the first place, not find a way to make social networking spam more obvious in my inbox.
The spine is central nervous system (CNS) just like the brain, while the remainder of the nerves (such as in the hand) are peripheral (PNS). Nerve regrowth is inhibited in the CNS. Peripheral nerves are not under this inhibition. It's quite a bit more complicated than that, but you can learn about why this is true if you want to take a developmental biology course. You'll learn all about nerve growth factors and neural crest cells. (If you had been one of my students, you'd know this already!)
My biggest problem with this sort of science is that the general public usually gets everything about it wrong, thanks to bad reporting or poor understanding of science in general. Someone publishes an article stating that morph A of gene X is found more often than one would statistically expect in a number of persons with a specific condition, but when the public gets the results we get headlines screaming "OMFG TEH GHEY GENE FOUND" and that kind of crap, because it makes better press. Yes, there are conditions that can be caused by an aberration in a single gene (albinism, narcolepsy, etc.) but more often than not genes that control complex behaviors require multiple interactions between multiple genes; until proven otherwise you should always understand that publication of a finding like this is indicitave of a contributing factor, not a causal factor, for a given condition.
Trust me. I do neuroscience for a living. When you're preparing the publication for submission, you always work your hardest to ensure that everything is accurate and properly phrased to be crystal clear about the limitations and drawbacks of the findings, only to have a reporter read nothing more than the abstract and get everything wrong. Don't blame the societal excuses on the scientists. People inclined to take the easy way out don't end up with PhDs, research careers, and articles in Nature.
Try SwissMemory. I have an older 512 MB SwissBit USB knife; my wife accidentally washed it (I left it in my pocket). The flash drive was completely fine afterwards. Didn't even hurt the LED flashlight. Far as I know the company makes solid memory, and I haven't heard anything about patent trolling on their part.
Ha. My brother-in-law called me a week or so ago with a dead drive, I told him to freeze it. He was skeptical but he gave it a go; he managed to rescue his girlfriend's stuff from the thing and couldn't thank me enough.
I read an article previously showing evidence that corporations are no longer just pushing for laws, they are actually drafting legislation and then giving it to friendly congresspersons. (Been happening for a long time, despite efforts in the mid-90s to curtail it.) This leads me to ask - is this new bill the result of pressure from the RIAA, or from the RIAA itself acting through a representative that was purchased specifically for this type of action?
The only way you or I will ever have the ability to influence Congress is if (a) corporate and private donations to individual persons in government are banned, or (b) you suddenly inherit Bill Gates' stock portfolio. Until then, the laws are going to be largely written the way big business wants them to be written - because more often than you realize big business is holding the pen.
Article in the FPP states it is a non-standard SD slot, which is what MS claims the problem is. Is the article incorrect?
The really, really sad thing is that tactics like this often exclude anyone not running Windows - not because the site won't actually work in any other browser, but because some web programmer was too lazy to write a browser detection script that actually worked. I've used user agent switchers to let myself in to quite a few "IE only" websites just to find that they worked quite well in FF once I got past the bouncer at the entry page. At least one such site (a page on a US .gov site, actually) was using a browser detect script that hadn't been changed since IE5. Really.
Poke around in some of the source code. You might be surprised.
First: If you don't think FF has an in-built spell check you might want to try a version newer than 1.5 before posting.
Second: Downloading IE7Pro? In what way does downloading an external front-end / add-on for a web browser substitute for creating a usable browser in the first place? Firefox, Opera or Safari, out of the box, no add-ons / extensions, are much more user-friendly and contain more functionality than IE7. If you have to download and install an additional program to get your browser close to par with the others, you're using the wrong browser. If MS ever figures that out, we might be getting somewhere.