I don't think it's a question of media bias. Media cluelessness or lazyness more like. The real problem is that the media too often presents scientific material without context. The "health reports" done by local tv media outlets are a prime example. They are generally nothing more than anectdotal evidence presented as fact with perhaps a dissenting egg head brought in for a "balance quote."
This sort of reporting is really an unacceptable way to make any decision about a complex topic, but it is compelling nonetheless. For whatever reason, we are not equipping people to understand the difference between an assertion with supporting evidence and an opinion. I think what we're seeing here is a bunch of scientists who are think they have the former being dismissed as if they merely have the latter and they are tired of it.
Most programmers are perfectly capable of making their own code solid, given enough time.
Capable? Yes, but willing? Not often enough. I think it's true that programmers are often called upon to produce code too quickly, but even when we get all the time we need, we have a tendency to spend our time thinking of new stuff to add rather than making sure what's already in the code base is rock solid.
There's a difference between being happy and being polite. I don't have to be the former to be the latter. It's even possible to express great displeasure and still be polite, try it sometime.
Good point! All this talk about hackability of the system and paper receipts and back doors obscures what should be the basic necessary but insufficient condition for any electronic voting system. Let me lay it out:
If the code isn't open and viewable to the public, I don't trust it...and neither should you.
A few weeks ago when Rush Limbaugh was in the news for his addiction to prescription painkillers, I remember reading a story on the Web (MSNBC maybe?) about his medication of choice, Oxycontin. It was talking about the dangers of unregulated use and so forth...pretty standard health reporting stuff.
The funny thing is that at the bottom of the article was a couple of google search word ads (to be fair, I'm not sure it was actually Google, but same concept) offering the chance to buy the drug the article had just warned us about. Talk about your mixed messages!
I suprisingly found that the SVG versions were just as small as (and usually smaller than) raster versions, and that was without any form of compression on the XML
This isn't all that surprising if you think about it. The size of an SVG source file doesn't change as you increase the size of the rendered graphic, but a rasterized image file size increases by the square of its width/height (given the same resolution).
Put another way, which is more concise, an array of pixels that renders a circle or an equation describing a circle?
Interesting that you quite correctly acknowlege the fact that every election result has a margin of error, but then fail to apply that fact to the 2001 result in Florida. I believe all the counts in that election were within a 2.6% margin.
The problem with the Florida 2001 election isn't that it got the results wrong. It is that we were forced to accept a statistically suspect outcome because of a lack of procedures for dealing with an extremely close count. Plus, whatever procedures might have been in place appear to have been hijacked by partisan entities. Whether you're Republican or Democrat, this is not a good thing for democracy.
As a developer, I don't care so much about office productivity apps. I use primarily an IDE, a text editor, an email client, a web browser and a command shell. On the rare occasions that I need to create a spreadsheet or a presentation, the X11 version of OpenOffice is more than sufficient. Gosling probably does more presentations than me, but there's always Keynote for that and I'm sure he's even more comfortable with the X server on his machine than I am. I don't see where he or any Sun developers have such a compelling reason to work on an OSX port.
Any virus, worm, etc. is designed to exploit weaknesses in a *specific* piece of software. Homogeneity is the enemy because it allows a virus to roam far and wide across identically configured systems. Thus, Microsoft suffers the downside of monopoly.
Christ! This is unbelievable. You know, if you market your products to the short attention span crowd you shouldn't be surprised when they decide you aren't worth the effort. Give me the goods, and I'll gladly pay for it.
Whoa guys! I think we could find a happy medium between no light zones and the current levels of light pollution. For example, most outdoor lighting needlessly sends photons up into the sky instead of down towards the ground where they are most useful. Sensibly designed lights are less wasteful, cheaper and let the sky stay dark.
Light pollution control is a topic nobody every considers, but it really makes a lot of sense when you do. Please educate yourself by going to the DarkSkys site.
To build a convincing argument here you need scientifically conducted surveys, not optional queries...
I don't agree. If I knew that a large corporation that I respected and was a leader in whatever field I was in was also standardized on email/web browsing with Mozilla, that would be a convincing argument for me to look into doing the same. Scientifically valid argument doesn't really come into it. All I'm looking for is an existence proof.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's a question of media bias. Media cluelessness or lazyness more like. The real problem is that the media too often presents scientific material without context. The "health reports" done by local tv media outlets are a prime example. They are generally nothing more than anectdotal evidence presented as fact with perhaps a dissenting egg head brought in for a "balance quote."
This sort of reporting is really an unacceptable way to make any decision about a complex topic, but it is compelling nonetheless. For whatever reason, we are not equipping people to understand the difference between an assertion with supporting evidence and an opinion. I think what we're seeing here is a bunch of scientists who are think they have the former being dismissed as if they merely have the latter and they are tired of it.
Capable? Yes, but willing? Not often enough. I think it's true that programmers are often called upon to produce code too quickly, but even when we get all the time we need, we have a tendency to spend our time thinking of new stuff to add rather than making sure what's already in the code base is rock solid.
There's a difference between being happy and being polite. I don't have to be the former to be the latter. It's even possible to express great displeasure and still be polite, try it sometime.
No argument about your last line though.
Good point! All this talk about hackability of the system and paper receipts and back doors obscures what should be the basic necessary but insufficient condition for any electronic voting system. Let me lay it out:
If the code isn't open and viewable to the public, I don't trust it...and neither should you.
In Western societies, people make decisions based on what advertisers tell them to do.
Amen! I'm perfectly happy to let the people who aren't smart enough to download Mozilla subsidize my web surfing.
Just say NO to pop-[up|under] ad blocking in IE.
Well one way to not get rid of spammers was the article's item #77 for google:
Let's get google to do our email address harvesting for us. That'd be porn for spammers.
Hey! I didn't realize that the Comic Book Guy did book reviews on Slashdot. Welcome!
Entertaining and informative review. I'll be sure to avoid this one. Honor Harrington [shudder]
It's beside the point of the grandparent post, but signs point to yes
Isn't this is sort of like a more sophisticated, suburban form of those squeegie guys that clean your windshield? ;-)
A few weeks ago when Rush Limbaugh was in the news for his addiction to prescription painkillers, I remember reading a story on the Web (MSNBC maybe?) about his medication of choice, Oxycontin. It was talking about the dangers of unregulated use and so forth...pretty standard health reporting stuff.
The funny thing is that at the bottom of the article was a couple of google search word ads (to be fair, I'm not sure it was actually Google, but same concept) offering the chance to buy the drug the article had just warned us about. Talk about your mixed messages!
This isn't all that surprising if you think about it. The size of an SVG source file doesn't change as you increase the size of the rendered graphic, but a rasterized image file size increases by the square of its width/height (given the same resolution).
Put another way, which is more concise, an array of pixels that renders a circle or an equation describing a circle?
If you have to build a buffer of "a couple of weeks" into your inventory system, you can't really call it Just In Time anymore, can you?
Interesting that you quite correctly acknowlege the fact that every election result has a margin of error, but then fail to apply that fact to the 2001 result in Florida. I believe all the counts in that election were within a 2.6% margin.
The problem with the Florida 2001 election isn't that it got the results wrong. It is that we were forced to accept a statistically suspect outcome because of a lack of procedures for dealing with an extremely close count. Plus, whatever procedures might have been in place appear to have been hijacked by partisan entities. Whether you're Republican or Democrat, this is not a good thing for democracy.
Sure. All you need to do is rotate the shield frequencies.
As a developer, I don't care so much about office productivity apps. I use primarily an IDE, a text editor, an email client, a web browser and a command shell. On the rare occasions that I need to create a spreadsheet or a presentation, the X11 version of OpenOffice is more than sufficient. Gosling probably does more presentations than me, but there's always Keynote for that and I'm sure he's even more comfortable with the X server on his machine than I am. I don't see where he or any Sun developers have such a compelling reason to work on an OSX port.
Any virus, worm, etc. is designed to exploit weaknesses in a *specific* piece of software. Homogeneity is the enemy because it allows a virus to roam far and wide across identically configured systems. Thus, Microsoft suffers the downside of monopoly.
Christ! This is unbelievable. You know, if you market your products to the short attention span crowd you shouldn't be surprised when they decide you aren't worth the effort. Give me the goods, and I'll gladly pay for it.
Whoa guys! I think we could find a happy medium between no light zones and the current levels of light pollution. For example, most outdoor lighting needlessly sends photons up into the sky instead of down towards the ground where they are most useful. Sensibly designed lights are less wasteful, cheaper and let the sky stay dark.
Light pollution control is a topic nobody every considers, but it really makes a lot of sense when you do. Please educate yourself by going to the DarkSkys site.
Ahh! so finally we can fill in the blank at point 2.
We'll see how it works out.
... Slashdot readers:
I guess there's no danger here.
I don't agree. If I knew that a large corporation that I respected and was a leader in whatever field I was in was also standardized on email/web browsing with Mozilla, that would be a convincing argument for me to look into doing the same. Scientifically valid argument doesn't really come into it. All I'm looking for is an existence proof.
Shame on you for stealing my punchline! ;-)
Bah! No cookies for you!
Not all alphabet systems have the concept of vowels.
Not all people have phone numbers